Comparison of Doppler Ultrasound and Computerized Tomographic Angiography in Evaluation of Cervical Arteries Stenosis in Stroke Patients, a Retrospective Single-Center Study

Abstract

There are different diagnostic modalities to investigate atherosclerosis cervical artery disease in suspected stroke patients. We aimed to test the concordance of findings of the two most widely used diagnostic modalities in stroke patients: duplex ultrasound (DUS) and computerized tomographic angiography (CTA). A total of 100 stroke patients were retrospectively included in the study, all of them had DUS followed by CTA. Discrepancies of DUS compared to the CTA results in both the internal carotid and vertebral arteries were found in 44% of the patients. The patients with significant differences in diagnostic results were characterized by older age. Evaluation of the degree of carotid artery stenosis revealed vast differences in patients with 50–69% stenosis found by DUS, in which 45.5% of them had a different percentage of stenosis found by CTA. In studying the degree of stenosis of the vertebral artery, only 47.1% of the patients with more than 50% stenosis found by DUS had the same results with CTA, while the remaining revealed normal or less than 50% stenosis by CTA. The current study emphasizes that CTA is more accurate than DUS in the evaluation of stenosis of the cervical arteries including both the internal carotid and vertebral arteries.