ABSTRACT

Takayasu arteritis (TA) is a rare systemic vasculitis, grouped in large vessel vasculitis (LVV) that mainly involves the aorta and its main branches. There are no valid follow-up parameters in the assessment of disease activity in TA. In daily rheumatology practice, clinicians benefit from acute phase response, imaging techniques and some new tools developed for clinical findings, and also their combinations to assess the disease activity. Conventional angiography, accepted as standard method for TA, has been replaced by new imaging techniques as magnetic resonance (MR), computer tomography (CT) angiography, B-mode Doppler ultrasonography (USG) and 18F-FDG positron emission tomography (PET). All these imaging modalities have some superiority in terms of detection of active disease with TA. In this review; we aimed to discuss the role of imaging techniques in assessing disease activity in TA.