Videofluoroscopy Service
What is videofluoroscopy?
A videofluoroscopy swallow study is an X-ray that looks at the way your child’s swallowing works. It is one of the number of tests which can be used to investigate any problems your child has with swallowing. It helps the speech and language therapist to identify the reasons for the swallowing problem, and to determine if there are ways to keep swallowing safe.
What to Expect in Your Videofluoroscopy Appointment
Below are some useful, child-friendly videos about what you can expect when attending your videofluoroscopy appointment.
Visiting our hospitals for a video fluoroscopy
Hi, we hear you’re coming into the hospital for a video fluoroscopy. We thought it might help to tell you a little bit about why you need one and what will happen when you come for your appointment. Your speech and language therapist has already watched you eating and drinking and wants to know more about your swallow. Some things we cannot see just by watching you. The radiology department in the radiology department in the hospital has these really cool machines that let us see inside your body. A video fluoroscopy is really just an x-ray movie of you eating and drinking. It shows us what is happening inside your mouth and throat when you suck, chew, and swallow. It can help us to see if food or drink is going down the wrong way. We can then try different things to stop this from happening.
Your mum, dad, or important grown-up can come into the x-ray room with you; they will need to wear a special leg coat to protect them from the x-rays. There will be some other people in the room; they will be standing behind a screen with a window so that you will be able to see them. Two speech and language therapists will be leading the video. We might try some different things during the video x-ray, such as making the drink thicker like a smoothie or a milkshake using a different cup or changing the way you are sitting. The radiographer works the machine and records the video.
The radiologist is a doctor who is a specialist in reading and making sense of the x-rays. They help us figure out what is going on inside you. You will sit on a special seat or in your own wheelchair next to the x-ray machine. You might need to move the machine a little bit forward and backwards or left and right to get into the right position, but it won’t touch you. You will need to sit as still as you can to get the best pictures. You will not be able to feel the x-ray being taken. It is just like filming a video. You need to bring some food and drink that you like from home. You can use your own cup, bowl, and spoon if you want to. We will add some special liquid called barium to your food and drink. This makes the food and drink show up black on the x-ray whilst you’re swallowing so we can see where it goes. It might make your food and drink look and taste a bit different, but it does not taste too bad. You will be in the x-ray room for about 20 minutes.
When we have all the pictures we need, we will show you some of the video and explain what we have seen. We might give you some advice in the appointment, but we will need to go away and look at the video in more detail. We will then write a report and send it to you, your school speech and language therapist, and all the doctors who help look after you. We hope this film has helped you to know more about video fluoroscopy, but if you are worried or have any questions, speak to your mum, dad, or grown-up.
What happens in a videofluoroscopy swallow study?
Hi mum and Harrison, thanks for coming in today. My name is Aoife, and I’m one of the speech and language therapists. It’s great that you’ve come to show everybody what we do with a videofluoroscopy swallow study. So what is videofluoroscopy? So a videofluoroscopy is a special X-ray of the swallow, and what we do is we mix some food with barium, and that lets us see what’s happening on the inside. What you might notice is there might be a chalky coating of the mouth, and when there is a nappy, there might be a slight discoloration. Why do some children need to have a videofluoroscopy? So a videofluoroscopy is a way for us to see what’s happening on the inside. That would let us see if there’s any episodes of choking or aspiration, and that’s when food enters the airway.
So we’ll just give you this LED coat, and that’s for some protection. So we’ll just pop this over your head. It’s heavy. We’ll just introduce you to everyone who’s here today. So we’ve got Alan, who’s our consultant radiologist. We’ve got Gillian, who’s our radiology nurse. We’ve got Leslie behind here, who’s another speech and language therapist, who will be looking at the images. I read in the appointment letter that Harrison couldn’t have anything to eat or drink for 3 hours before this. I was just wondering why that was. So we really want Harrison to be ready to eat and drink with the food that you brought in. We’re just going to go in this chair here.
Okay, so we have the food here, and it’s great that you brought the bowl, spoon, and cup from home. Sometimes the barium can just change what the food looks like a wee bit, so it just makes it a bit more familiar for Harrison. And we’d ask that you give him the food and the drink, just because he’ll be more
comfortable, because he knows you best. Sure, that’s no problem. Okay. Alan’s just going to set everything up with the camera. That’s great, perfect. We’re in a good position. Great. Okay. What I’ll do is I’ll give you the food; we’ll start with the yogurt. You are doing good eating. We can see it up on the screen here. That’s lovely. Now can we just see Harrison having a drink from his cup? Yes, of course. Thank you. Okay, so just another drink. That’s some good drinking. So that’s us finished with the assessment. Alan will go and review the images with Leslie. And while he’s doing that, we can just get Harrison back into his buggy. So that went really well. Harrison, you were a superstar.
Thank you. I’ve had a chance to review the pictures with Alan, and this is just a snapshot of how Harrison’s managed today. We’re going to look at it in the whole picture of his feeding, but he coped really well with the food. His swallow looked normal; there were no concerns. And with the liquids, we didn’t see any signs of aspiration of it going into his airway, but he did find it a bit harder to control. So we would recommend that you give him some slightly thicker fluids rather than the thin ones. But just keep going with the food as you are. We’ll contact your community speech and language therapist so that she knows how you got on today and can continue to support you in the community. So thank you for coming today. Thank you. We’re saying bye.
What Is Videofluoroscopy? Operation Ouch – Science for Kids
Every second of every day your brain is choosing what to ignore and what to pay attention to, but we all here see and feel the world in different ways. There’s one condition though that really impacts how you communicate with people around you and sense the world; it affects over one in a hundred people, and it’s called autism spectrum disorder, or autism for short. This is Alex; he’s ten, and he has autism, so Alex, if you have to explain to people what it’s like for you to have autism, what do you say difficulties in day-to-day life because I absolutely love crowds and busy areas and people rushing past me? Someone with autism is on the autism spectrum. This is like a scale, and different people are affected in different ways. We’ve come to the park and set up an experiment to demonstrate how Alex’s autism affects his senses.
What I’ve done is label the faders, which are like the volume knobs with different sounds, and these are all the sounds we can hear around us and when you’re talking. I know there’s a bit of traffic, there’s some bird singing, I can hear the kids playing over there in the playground, there’s a dog barking, but mainly I can hear you, and my brain can just turn all these other sounds off. Can you show me maybe what it’s like for you to be overloaded with all this sensory information can lead to something called a meltdown? What’s it like when you’re having a meltdown in your head? Well, I’m just feeling kind of upset, and I agree. I’m supposed to be distressed, and then I’m really calm.
Although autism can be disorientating and confusing, some autistic people are able to concentrate incredibly well on something they love, and for Alex, that’s filmmaking. We’ve come to the autism show in Manchester with some of Alex’s friends who often act in his films. What do you think it is about autism and directing films that those two things work quite well together? Focusing on one task is doing it one. Yeah, he’s very focused and a lot of the time has better ideas than us to help Alex’s friends understand what it can be like to have autism.
We’re giving them these virtual reality goggles and headphones, which will play an autism simulation. You know, I’ve never tried virtual reality before. I can hear every single noise in this room, and the light is very dazzling, and I can’t focus on the thing I think I need to be paying attention to, which is this lady who’s telling me to wait, but I can’t understand what she’s saying. Wow, what did you think of it? Jacob was really intense about what was going to happen next. It’s very overwhelming, like you can’t concentrate on one thing because there’s just so much going on. I already explained to me a lot more about how being artistic is. Yes, you might know someone with autism. You may have autism yourself, but even if you do, it can be very hard to know what other people with autism are going through. There are a few things you can do to help: you can give people time, you can speak really clearly, and you can remember that someone with autism may be experiencing the world in a more stressful way. Most importantly, autism isn’t the main thing about anybody; people on the autism spectrum can still do absolutely amazing things, and I’m certain that one day I’m going to be in the cinema.
Watching a film directed by Alex Walls can be really annoying sometimes and make you wish you could see over them or through them. Zhaan You’re not eating my cake, are you? No, no, no good. Now your skin can be a little bit like a wall. When you get a medical problem on the outside, it’s easy to see it, treat it, and watch it heal, but when you get medical mysteries going on inside the body, there’s one hospital department you need to turn to for help, but the radiology department, because they’ve got all kinds of cool kits that can actually see inside the body, a bit like this periscope lets me see over the wall, and the new radiology department at Alda hey cost a whopping 7 million pounds. This department x-rays 75,000 patients a year, and more than half of those have their snaps taken on this plain film x-ray machine. X-rays let doctors look at your bones; they’re like a super powerful version of ordinary light that can pass through your skin when they meet bones. x-rays stopped dead in their tracks, and the perfect picture can be taken. It’s not just bones that show up in an x-ray, though I’m heading to another part of the radiology department to see a different type of x-ray machine. This one is used to study people who have problems swallowing.
Nine-year-old Isabelle is currently fed through a tube in her stomach as a result of having an operation. She’s come to the radiology department today for a video fluoroscopy test to see if it’s now safe for her to eat and drink normally, so I’m wearing this apron, and it is very heavy because it’s made of lead, and that protects me from radiation. Radiation isn’t dangerous for the patients, but if you get a little bit every day, that could be dangerous to you. I preferred a green one. Isabelle’s dad feeds her some special liquid that x-rays can’t pass through, so it shows up black on the image. Can you see it? What’s amazing is that you’re making an x-ray movie so we can see the liquid going down her throat as a video, and that means we can make sure that it’s safe for her to keep swallowing and that none of the food is going down the wrong way, so Isabelle’s oesophagus is working in. The fluoroscopy has shown the doctors that it’s safe for her to start eating again. Isn’t that amazing after a whole year of being fed through a tube? It’s busy in the radiology department today down the corridor. Nine-year-old Nev is having another sort of picture taken called an ultrasound for a mystery swelling in her foot. Here to do that, it’s Dr. Gosar Column.
The way the ultrasound machine is working is that it’s using a probe that emits a very high-frequency noise, such a high pitch that you can’t hear it. Most sound waves bounce back differently depending on whether they hit bone or whether they hit muscle or different things, and it’s listening for the echoes coming back and then putting those echoes into an image so there’s something possibly a splinter irritating Neves foot that will require further investigation. Have you given it a name? That’s a great thing. Without the amazing radiology department at that old Ahey hospital, the doctors and other experts would have to spend a lot more time guessing about diagnosing people’s conditions, but these machines are so powerful they can see deep inside your body; they could even see a piece of cake inside your stomach.