[Rupture and extravascular migration of a vena cava filter. Apropos of a case]

The authors report the case of a 68 year old woman who underwent implantation of a Greenfield vena caval filter for recurrent pulmonary embolism. Migration of the filter out of the vena cava into the perivenal fat was discovered two years later during another embolic episode. One of the spokes of the filter had migrated into the iliac fossa. This case illustrates two possible complications of caval filters: rupture and migration. The increasing number of cases reported in the literature indicates the necessity of keeping a register of the complications encountered with different models to avoid the most dangerous ones.