Cerebral blood flow in the newborn infant: comparison of Doppler ultrasound and 133xenon clearance

Two techniques of Doppler ultrasound examination, continuous-wave and range-gated, applied to the anterior cerebral artery and to the internal carotid artery, were compared with 133xenon clearance after intravenous injection. Thirty-two sets of measurements were obtained in 16 newborn infants. The pulsatility index, the mean flow velocity, and the end-diastolic flow velocity were read from the Doppler recordings. Mean cerebral blood flow was estimated from the 133Xe clearance curves. The correlation coefficients between the Doppler and the 133Xe measurements ranged from 0.41 to 0.82. In the subset of 16 first measurements in each infant, there were no statistically significant differences between the correlation coefficients of the various Doppler ultrasound variables, but the correlation coefficients were consistently lower for the pulsatility index than for mean flow velocity or end-diastolic flow velocity, and they were consistently higher for the range-gated than for the continuous-wave Doppler technique.