Color Doppler Sonographic Determination of Renal Blood Flow in Healthy Children

he determination of renal blood flow is ofgreat interest in many clinical settings thatalter renal function, such as acute or chronicrenal failure, inflammation, scarring, swelling,trauma, operations, and other conditions.Renal perfusion is the necessary prerequisite ofrenal function. Depression of renal perfusion willlead to loss of function when the functional reserveof the kidney has become exhausted. Until nowpediatricians have been dependent on relativelyinsensitive indicators of renal function, such as crea-tinine or urea concentrations, or has had to carry outtime-consuming or expensive procedures like tests ofclearances or nuclear medical investigations. A bed-side method for evaluating renal perfusion is there-fore desirable.Color Doppler sonography offers the possibility ofmeasuring renal perfusion parameters even in smallor chronically ill children. Only semiquantitativetechniques have been established. The most com-monly used are RI and PI. These indices reflect rela-tionships of blood flow velocities at various points inone cardiac cycle but do not give any informationabout the volume of blood passing through the kid-neys. They were the first parameters to describe thespectral analysis of the renal Doppler sonographic