Teaching Points
- Clinical prediction rules (eg Wells Criteria) may be used to categorise patients into low, medium or high risk
- Low risk and negative serum D-Dimer effectively excludes DVT
- Medium and high risk patients should undergo doppler ultrasound without D-Dimer estimation
- Ultrasound is highly sensitive for proximal lower limb deep vein thrombosis
- US is less sensitive for deep calf vein thrombosis and for iliac vein thrombosis
- After a negative doppler ultrasound, follow-up US in patients with high clinical suspicion may be indicated to exclude a calf thrombosis that is propagating proximally
File Formats
Some documents for download on this website are in a Portable Document Format (PDF). To read these files you might need to download Adobe® Acrobat Reader.
