In the United States, abdominal CT is the primary imaging technique used to examine patients who have sustained blunt abdominal trauma. At our institution, imaging findings help direct patient treatment, particularly by stratifying hemodynamically stable patients into those who require intervention and those who can be treated nonsurgically. Vascular injury is an especially important subset of traumatic injury because many patients with this injury require urgent surgical or angiographic intervention and because injuries�such as those to the retrohepatic inferior vena cava (IVC) and the liver hilum�are associated with a high morbidity and mortality [1]. In this article, we present a spectrum of abdominal venous abnormalities from blunt trauma as depicted on CT.
We searched the CT database at our level I trauma center for the abdominal CT reports files from 1988 to 1999 of patients who sustained blunt abdominal trauma. Of approximately 25,000 reports of CT examinations, 735 reports indicated possible venous abnormalities. These CT reports were examined for representative cases of common venous injuries and of unusual vascular trauma. Images from these CT studies were selected to show a range of abdominal venous abnormalities, and findings were correlated with clinical, radiologic, surgical, and pathologic records.