Reproducibility and repeatability of maternal venous Doppler flow measurements in renal interlobar and hepatic veins.

摘要

Many physiological variables are known to interfere with venous return: cardiac contractility, respiration, body position, gravidity, external compression, and morphological and embryological variations, and Doppler velocimetry is subject to intra- and interob-server variation. For these reasons, sonographers tend to refrain from performing venous Doppler velocimetry. While Doppler flow characteristics of maternal renal interlobar and hepatic veins have now been described in both uncomplicated pregnancies and those affected by pre-eclampsia, some of these studies being performed using a standard protocol with a reported intraob-server intraclass correlation coefficient of 0.88, there are no available data regarding the interobserver correlation and/or reproducibility of this methodology.