Keeping in line with the recent ultrasound posts this month, Dr. Mike Stone’s star team is releasing a series of Paucis Verbis cards on the basics of bedside ultrasonography. Here is the first in the series on the Focused Assessment with Sonography in Trauma (FAST) by Drs. Wilma Chan, John Eicken, and Mike Stone.
Go to ALiEM (PV) Cards for more resources.
Welcome to the inaugural post for an exciting new ultrasound-based case series called “Ultrasound For The Win!” (#US4TW). In this peer-reviewed case series, we will focus on real clinical cases where bedside ultrasound changed the management or aided in the diagnosis. In our first case, we present a 28-year-old female with shortness of breath.
A 64 year old man with an extensive history of abdominal surgeries presents to the emergency department with abdominal pain and vomiting. Because you suspect a bowel obstruction, you bring an ultrasound machine to the bedside prior to the completion of any laboratory testing or other imaging. A curvilinear probe in the abdominal mode setting was used to scan in all four quadrants of the abdomen looking in both the sagittal and transverse planes.
Case: A 45 year old female with end-stage renal disease presents with 2 days of worsening pain, swelling, and color change of her left upper extremity. The symptoms began after her left arm arteriovenous (AV) fistula was accessed for hemodialysis. The skin is tense and a bruit is present. What is your diagnosis for this swollen upper extremity? Click on the image for a larger view.
You are spending a month in rural Kenya, doing an ultrasound teaching course. Your enthusiastic participants have been ultrasounding every chance they get. Unfortunately, this has caused your ultrasound gel supplies to dwindle. It will be a month before a new shipment of gel arrives from Nairobi. This gel will cost about $5 per bottle, which is a considerable expense for the local hospital’s budget.
It’s 3 am in the middle of your busy night shift and you begin your evaluation of a 65 year-old woman with diabetes with several hours of unilateral flashes of light in her left eye. Her visual fields seem normal, but you are unable to see her fundus with your direct ophthalmoscope. Luckily, you remembered the teaching from your ultrasound rotation during residency.
Need a quick refresher course on how to do an ultrasound-guided ear block or ankle arthrocentesis? I recently found out about Drs. Andrew Herring and Arun Nagdev’s Highland Emergency Ultrasound website and thought it was a great resource to share with others in the EM world. The website has easy-to-follow pictorial instructions of anatomic landmarks, probe placement, and ultrasound images of the most common blocks and other procedures.