Foam sclerotherapy

Abstract

Over the past decade there has been an evolution from ultrasound-guided liquid sclerotherapy [1] to ultrasound guided foam sclerotherapy [2, 3]. Liquid sclerotherapy is used extensively to ablate small and medium sized tributary varicies usually with visual guidance. US guided liquid sclerosants have been shown to be able to close truncal veins but their success rates, whether injected by needle or catheter were inferior to that now achieved with EVTA. Ultrasound-guided foam sclerotherapy (UGFS), increasingly being referred to as endovenous chemical ablation, may be defined as the injection into a vein of a sclerosing agent which has been rendered foam in order to permanently ablate the target vein [4].