d’autant que

20:30 Jul 4, 2011 

Thank you all again for your contributions!!!

12:52 Jul 4, 2011 

The popliteal and femoral veins are in the leg. Thus the abdominal Doppler was to investigate correlative circulatory phenomena in the abdomen.

10:55 Jul 4, 2011 

Many thanks for all youer ideas and comments, you can see now why I am really struggling to make sense of this sentence.. Douglas in answer to your questions the patient suffered from deep vein thrombosis in the right popliteal vein and a bilateral pulmonary embolism. The Doppler ultrasound shows a partial regression of the thrombosis, and the femoral vein shows normal patency and is compressible.
At popliteal level there is still a non occlusive thrombus, 5 mm thick associated with a deep venous reflux of low but prolonged intensity: 2 seconds, occupying around 50% of the venous lumen. The crural veins and the deep veins of the left lower limb show normal patency and are compressible with no sign of thrombosis.
...and then it moves onto the sentence I asked about. I am not sure how this will change the way I can translate it!

20:47 Jul 3, 2011 

Taken alone, the sentence seems peculiarly uninformative and ambiguous. Surely all doctors (and possibly even all medical translators) already know that there are arteries of large diameter in the lower limbs? If so, why restate that in a Doppler report? Were the arteries narrowed elsewhere? (i.e. perhaps "gros" in this context really means satisfactory/normal/undiseased?) Or perhaps the sentence is a sardonic reflection on the generally diseased state of the patient's arteries? In my view, the contrastive effect of "d'autant que" cannot be properly translated without more context. What was the clinical indication for the test? What were the other findings?

15:08 Jul 3, 2011 

Your translation of "d'autant que" sounds OK to me, but I defer to the medical specialists regarding the rationale.