Investigation of the Upper Airway Anatomy With Ultrasound

Lun, Hai-Mei; Zhu, Shang-Yong; Liu, Ruochuan; Gong, Jian-gu; Liu, Yao-Li

doi:10.1097/ruq.0000000000000163

Cited by 12 publications

(7 citation statements)

References 13 publications

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“…Although we only provided two patients' clinical records, we indeed found radial endobronchial ultrasonography can be applied to evaluate the improvement of airway remodeling before and after BT by measuring the airway wall thickness [ 16 ]. Besides, it was simple to operate and easy to be promoted in clinic.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Tentative study on radial endobronchial ultrasonography evaluating airway wall thickness before and after bronchial thermoplasty

Huang

Zhu

et al. 2022

Respiratory Medicine Case Reports

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Aim We aimed to observe the clinical practicing value of radial endobronchial ultrasonography evaluating airway wall thickness before and after bronchial thermoplasty. Methods We selected two patients who received bronchial thermoplasty in our hospital. We measured the thickness of each segmental airway wall of each patient by radial endobronchial ultrasonography, and observed the difference before and after the therapy. All the treatments and measurement were performed by a designated bronchoscopist and the locations and depths of the ultrasound probe were relatively fixed, to reduce the operational error. Results In both two patients, the mean thicknesses of all segmental airway walls was 4.9 ± 0.7 mm before the first session of BT; the mean thickness was 4.13 ± 0.92 mm before the second session; the mean thickness was 2.69 ± 0.68 mm before the third session; the mean thickness was 2.7 ± 0.5 mm in the follow-up measurement at six months after the BT treatment; all thicknesses of airway wall were significantly reduced comparing with those before treatment; all the thicknesses of the airway walls were stable without any tendency of thickening after six months. Although the airways in the right middle lobe of both two patients were not received BT, their thicknesses were also decreased comparing with those before the treatment; both upper lobes bronchus of both two patients were not activated in the first and second sessions, but their thicknesses were also decreased at the third measurement. Conclusion Radial endobronchial ultrasonography is a simple and practical method to measure the thickness of patient's airway wall. Bronchial thermoplasty can effectively reduce the thickness of airway wall. It can reduce airway smooth muscle by direct activation and other possible more complicated mechanism, which need further research.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Tentative study on radial endobronchial ultrasonography evaluating airway wall thickness before and after bronchial thermoplasty

Huang

Zhu

et al. 2022

Respiratory Medicine Case Reports

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“…In this position, the airway appeared as a curved inverted-U shaped echogenic line during normal breathing (Fig. 1 a) 20 , 22 . In this curve-shaped view, one part of the curve showed the reflection from the base of the tongue/genioglossal muscle, which was the anterior part of the upper airway.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 95%

A pilot observation using ultrasonography and vowel articulation to investigate the influence of suspected obstructive sleep apnea on upper airway

Saha,

Rattansingh,

Martino

et al. 2024

Sci Rep

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Failure to employ suitable measures before administering full anesthesia to patients with obstructive sleep apnea (OSA) who are undergoing surgery may lead to developing complications after surgery. Therefore, it is very important to screen OSA before performing a surgery, which is currently done by subjective questionnaires such as STOP-Bang, Berlin scores. These questionnaires have 10–36% specificity in detecting sleep apnea, along with no information given on anatomy of upper airway, which is important for intubation. To address these challenges, we performed a pilot study to understand the utility of ultrasonography and vowel articulation in screening OSA. Our objective was to investigate the influence of OSA risk factors in vowel articulation through ultrasonography and acoustic features analysis. To accomplish this, we recruited 18 individuals with no risk of OSA and 13 individuals with high risk of OSA and asked them to utter vowels, such as /a/ (as in “Sah”), /e/ (as in “See”). An expert ultra-sonographer measured the parasagittal anterior–posterior (PAP) and transverse diameter of the upper airway. From the recorded vowel sounds, we extracted 106 features, including power, pitch, formant, and Mel frequency cepstral coefficients (MFCC). We analyzed the variation of the PAP diameters and vowel features from "See: /i/" to "Sah /a/" between control and OSA groups by two-way repeated measures ANOVA. We found that, there was a variation of upper airway diameter from “See” to “Sah” was significantly smaller in OSA group than control group (OSA: ∆12.8 ± 5.3 mm vs. control: ∆22.5 ± 3.9 mm OSA, p < 0.01). Moreover, we found several vowel features showed the exact same or opposite trend as PAP diameter variation, which led us to build a machine learning model to estimate PAP diameter from vowel features. We found a correlation coefficient of 0.75 between the estimated and measured PAP diameter after applying four estimation models and combining their output with a random forest model, which showed the feasibility of using acoustic features of vowel sounds to monitor upper airway diameter. Overall, this study has proven the concept that ultrasonography and vowel sounds analysis may be useful as an easily accessible imaging tool of upper airway.

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“…Functionally, the pharynx is involved in respiration, deglutition, and vocalization. The anatomy of the upper airway helps to accommodate these functions (Lun et al 2016). The pharynx has a half-cylindrical shape and is approximately 13 cm long (Nemec et al 2009).…”

Section: Pharynxmentioning

confidence: 99%

Extraoral anatomy in CBCT – a literature review. Part 4: Pharyngocervical region

Von Arx,

Lozanoff,

Bornstein

2020

Swiss Dent. J. SSO

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This review about extraoral anatomy depicted in cone beam computed tomography describes the pharyngocervical region. Large (≥ 8 × 8 cm) field of views of the maxilla and/or mandible will inevita-bly depict the pharyngocervical region that com-prises the posterior upper airway, the pharyngeal part of the digestive tract, as well as the cervical segment of the spine. The latter consists of seven cervical vertebrae (C1-C7) with corresponding distinctive features, i.e., the atlas (C1) and the axis (C2). In addition, cervical vertebrae serve as ref-erences for the vertical position of anatomical structures. For instance, C4 is a typical landmark since it generally denotes the level of the chin, of the body of the hyoid bone, of the base of the epiglottis, and of the bifurcation of the common carotid artery, respectively. The pharynx, which is functionally involved in respiration, deglutition, and vocalization, extends from the lower aspect of the skull base to the esophagus. Anatomically, the pharynx is divided into three segments, i.e. the nasopharynx, the oropharynx, and the laryn-gopharynx. All communicate anteriorly with cor-responding cavities, i.e. the nasal cavities, the oral cavity, and the larynx. Although not directly located within the pharyngocervical region, the hyoid bone and the styloid process are also dis-cussed in this review, since both structures are commonly visible on CBCT images of this region.

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Investigation of the Upper Airway Anatomy With Ultrasound

Abstract: Ultrasonography can determine the anatomy of the upper airway and perform the quantitative analysis of the upper airway lumen during respiration. The results were encouraging and support the utility of ultrasonography in future airway disorder studies.

Cited by 12 publications

References 13 publications

Tentative study on radial endobronchial ultrasonography evaluating airway wall thickness before and after bronchial thermoplasty

Tentative study on radial endobronchial ultrasonography evaluating airway wall thickness before and after bronchial thermoplasty

A pilot observation using ultrasonography and vowel articulation to investigate the influence of suspected obstructive sleep apnea on upper airway

Extraoral anatomy in CBCT – a literature review. Part 4: Pharyngocervical region

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