End-of-Residency Perspective on Early Ultrasound Education

Posted on May 31, 2022 by aium1952

I remember clearly the first day I ever held an ultrasound probe. It was my second week of medical school, I knew next to nothing about medicine, and my faculty member turns to me and enthusiastically says “oh look, you have a few thyroid cysts.” I, of course, immediately thought a few things. First, how many are there, how big are they, what do I need to do, could it be cancer, and why is the faculty member so nonchalant about this.

The next thing I thought was “what is a thyroid”.

After the initial and very clearly unnecessary panic was over, I thought to myself that it was very interesting we were scanning things before we were taught about them in class. Throughout my training, I have come to realize how lucky I was to get such early exposure to ultrasound training and teaching. At Eastern Virginia Medical School, ultrasound was integrated into all aspects of the curriculum. This started in anatomy lab, continued into our second-year courses in pathology, and was a crucial part of 3rd year rotations where each rotation had several portable ultrasounds for students to use to scan. In the Family Medicine clerkship, we were tasked with scanning multiple people for AAA, and on surgery, we had to get 5 images of cholelithiasis. By the 4^th year, faculty were using ultrasound to do procedural training and students were in the trauma bay performing FAST exams for the team. Although I thought this was the norm, I quickly found out on the interview trail that this experience separated me from a lot of my peers.

A selfie of a very young David sent to his clerkship director as proof he did his scans for the rotation.

In residency, we had a point-of-care or POCUS-centered curriculum. Although we all got the same instruction, I felt like my previous experience, and most of all my comfort with the probe, made me into the “ultrasound guy” of my program. While the immense clinical utility is not lost on any of my peers, the amount of time it takes to become comfortable just did not fit into the time constraints of residency.

While I do not think ultrasound can be filed under “you can’t teach an old dog new tricks,” I do strongly believe that integrating it into medical education early on is crucial for the future of medicine. Based on my conversations with colleagues at different schools and institutions, often, ultrasound training is saved for residents and fellows, and it really shouldn’t be. Although, this surely is based on several factors including class size, cost, requirement for specialization (eg, prenatal ultrasound for OB/GYN, MSK ultrasound for Sports Medicine and Orthopedics), and availability of sufficient machines.

One of the most frustrating things for me is the train of thought that imaging is ruining the art of the physical exam. While yes, many people will get a CT of their abdomen and pelvis in the ED, the dynamic and live view that ultrasound provides is invaluable in learning about anatomy. Multiple studies, including one that I have worked on, have shown that a longitudinal and integrated ultrasound curriculum improves procedural and physical exam skills. Many of these studies show that the biggest effect is when it is started early in training.

After being the confused MS1 who was freaking out about his thyroid cysts (which since have gone away by the way), and being slightly frustrated at the time that more work and learning was on my plate, it’s abundantly clear to me now that this is the direction that medical education needs to go. Every first-year medical student at every institution should have their hands on probes throughout their first year, especially while learning anatomy. My challenge to medical school leadership is to find a way to incorporate or expand on ultrasound in their curriculum. At first, your students will not be confident, and they will feel like they don’t know what they are doing, but it CAN and it WILL help in the long run. It certainly did for me.

David Neuberger, MD, is currently a 3^rd year Family Medicine Resident at Emory University in Atlanta, GA. He will be pursuing a Primary Care Sports Medicine fellowship at the University of Louisville this upcoming year and has a special interest in ultrasound and ultrasound education.

How I Brought Point-of-Care Ultrasound (POCUS) to My Family Medicine Department

Posted on April 19, 2022 by aium1952

As I demonstrate a handheld ultrasound (US) machine to the eager medical students in our clinical simulation laboratory today, I am struck by a vivid recollection of my own first time seeing a handheld US machine. I was a 4^th year medical student on an away rotation at a rural hospital in my home country of Peru. A visiting foreign obstetrician produced an amazing small machine, detecting fetal malposition when unsatisfied with palpation with Leopold’s maneuvers alone.

My fascination with the clinical utility of bedside US began that day and has continued through my move to US postgraduate training in family medicine, a geriatric medicine fellowship, academic faculty roles, the completion of an accredited POCUS fellowship, and right through to my current passion for growing POCUS use within family medicine practice.

I have learned so much along the way, have been helped by so many mentors and colleagues, that I write today to share my POCUS journey in the hopes that my story may be useful to others.

In 2018, I joined the department of Family Medicine at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor (AAFP). The AAFP had recently released its novel POCUS curriculum guidelines for family medicine physicians, and the department was in search of a champion to lead the development of a POCUS program for our department. I was fortunate to be chosen for this role and over the intervening 3 years have had the privilege of working with several wonderful, enthusiastic colleagues across our department, our institution, and on a national scale through the AAFP’s POCUS interest group.

Early on in my role as POCUS champion, I realized that to be successful with this project, I was going to need a lot of help from a lot of people! My first stop (along a long journey) was to ask my department chair for time and resources. He readily obliged, providing me with the protected time to do an established accredited POCUS fellowship (which luckily was available through our emergency medicine department) and important administrative resources, which were also vital as we developed our program.

During my yearlong fellowship, I worked hard to become a clinical sonographer, educator, academic leader, and administrator in US. These newly acquired skills have been invaluable since assuming the role of Clinical US director for my department. There have been many challenges and administrative headaches—who knew that selecting and purchasing ultrasound machines could be so complicated?!?—but countless successes.

In terms of successes, we have defined minimum credentialing requirements for POCUS use, defined pathways for faculty interested in training in POCUS, and obtained hospital privileges for the same from our department. We have developed billing for our clinical POCUS use in ambulatory care as well as electronic health record order sets and templates for easy documentation. With regard to the POCUS curriculum that we initially set out to create, we now have a formal POCUS curriculum for family medicine residents as well as an intensive US track for residents interested in a more in-depth POCUS educational experience. Additionally, I am so excited that we will be welcoming our first Advanced Primary Care US fellow for a one-year fellowship this July.

It has not always been easy, but I have been so fortunate with wonderful supportive departmental leadership and fantastic emergency medicine colleagues who are always eager to help with advice on regulatory or administrative requirements. Developing the POCUS program for our department has taken a lot more time than I initially anticipated, and at times, the process has proved tedious. There certainly have been times when I have doubted if it has been worth the time and effort and doubted that colleagues share my vision for the potential POCUS offers for improving our patient care in family medicine or whether they see it as a burden, yet another thing to learn. However, the excitement I felt the first time I saw the handheld US those (many!) years ago in Peru, is reflected in the excitement I see in the faces of the medical students here in the clinical simulation lab today. This shared enthusiasm and passion for POCUS tells me that in the end, it truly will have been worth it.

An US track resident performing US as part of training.

Juana Nicoll Capizzano, MD, is a Clinical Assistant Professor and Clinical US Director of Family Medicine at Michigan University.

Interested in learning more about developing ultrasound education? Check out the following posts from the Scan:

Getting Sonography Students Hands-on Experience

Ultrasound Education in the Post-COVID Era

Sink or Swim? Modifying POCUS Medical Education Curriculum During Coronavirus Pandemic

Teaching Point-of-Care Ultrasound

When Data Isn’t Enough!

Posted on April 5, 2022 by aium1952

“I’m looking for volunteers, not hostages.”
— Mike Tomlin (Head Coach of the Pittsburgh Steelers Football Team)

I enjoy quotes that help keep things in perspective (even though I’m more an ice hockey fan than an American football fan), and I could have used coach’s advice after my Emergency Ultrasound Fellowship concluded in 2002. I believed, then, that every Emergency Physician would find the allure of ultrasound’s rapid, portable diagnosis irresistible and abruptly begin using it. A string of successful research and equally enthused editors would publish article after article and ease the path to acceptance of “emergency medicine ultrasound” or “point-of-care ultrasound” (POCUS).

As if data would impose ultrasound adoption.

The hard pivot did not come as quickly as I hoped. As an example, my early work examined how ultrasound improved the safety of central venous cannulation. The fields of Anesthesia and Interventional Radiology learned this years before Emergency Medicine, and it seemed natural that, once adopted, finding a vein with ultrasound anywhere would prove too irresistible for the Emergency Physician to pass up.

I soon discovered that trainees embraced ultrasound (they knew no alternative) but more experienced providers passed on it, stubbornly reverting to what they found more comfortable. They rationalized that learning something new disrupted their workflow. Besides, their cases rarely had complications.

Make no mistake, youth alone would not resolve the disrupted workflow dilemma. A few years later, motivated by the work of Peter Pronovost in intensive care units and championed by Atul Gawande’s Checklist Manifesto, my research team attempted to incorporate ultrasound-guided central line checklists in the Emergency Department to decrease central line-associated bloodstream infections. After presentations at journal club and grand rounds, we measured checklist adherence at exactly zero! I distinctly remember trainees’ wry joy in seeing my face as the paper with the printed checklist was ceremoniously discarded, the central line expertly inserted under ultrasound, and the patient stabilized. The academic journals and even the lay press had done their part disseminating the new information but implementation of a checklist…that was a new challenge unto itself.

Examining what changes behavior in healthcare feels like psychoanalysis. Lesson one is we’re not rational beings moved by published data. The AIUM promotes guidelines, education, and training, and offers a stage to persuade and model the benefits of ultrasound-assisted medicine. But is this enough?

The growing field of Implementation Science suggests there’s more to do. A salient theory pertinent to changing behavior in health care is known as the COM-B system. Capability, Opportunity, and Motivation are essential conditions that underpin Behavior. In our checklist example, we possessed the capability and opportunity but the motivation was so low it sank adoption. Behavior didn’t change. Data was not enough.

Our team, led by Dr. Enyo Ablordeppey, took a different approach to adopting new ultrasound techniques, which we presented at AIUM 2022 in San Diego. Before we imposed confirming central line placement solely by ultrasound, precluding the chest x-ray and saving radiation exposure, we worked backward from COM-B to create a framework of interventions. We gathered the group of end-users and began by listening to them. Out of these sessions, we developed seven strategies:

Training
Supervision
Feedback
Organizational buy-in
Decision support
Planned adaptation (ie, prizes for, and promotion of, early adopters)
Algorithm development

Our program to De-Implement Routine Chest Radiographs after Adoption of Ultrasound Guided Insertion and Confirmation of Central Venous Catheter Protocol is called DRAUP. It’s a mouthful and a mound of work but, 6 months into it, we increased ultrasound adoption and decreased chest x-ray utilization by 50% with identical complication rates to conventional behavior. For comparison, 10 years later, we still don’t utilize the central line insertion checklists!

At the root of it, implementing innovative ultrasound requires addressing an interplay of environmental, cognitive, sensory, and emotional processes. All ultrasound users have experienced the implementation challenge when an innovation seems blithely disregarded despite impact. Procedural guidance, nerve blocks, spectral Doppler diagnostics (all topics expertly covered in San Diego at AIUM 2022) lack traction despite concluding slides with imperceptible font sizes to document volumes of references!

Why isn’t the evidence enough? Perhaps we’ve taken the wrong approach? Perhaps we need to uncover barriers from our non-ultrasound using hostages and promote facilitators from our ultrasound volunteers! What’s worked at your shop?

Dr. Daniel Theodoro, MD, MSCI, is the Division Director of Washington University’s Emergency Medicine Ultrasound Program. In 2002, he completed the first Emergency Medicine Ultrasound Fellowship at North Shore University Hospital in Manhasset, New York. His team’s current projects include how to de-implement dogmatic chest x-rays after ultrasound-driven central line placement confirmation, how well COVID lung findings prognosticate future oxygen requirements, and how TEE can inform CPR quality. Tweet him @TeddyDanielz!

Interested in learning more about POCUS? Check out the following posts from the Scan:

Let’s Democratize Ultrasound, and Save Lives

Posted on February 22, 2022 by aium1952

The health systems of most underdeveloped countries have one thing in common: the total absence of health insurance. The entire cost of illness is borne by the patient and their family. If we add to this problem low and uncertain incomes, the result is patients who often do not have enough money to pay for their health care. In the best cases, we have patients who will be content to pay only for the minimum and essential care since they cannot afford more. This very often leads to insufficient care.

Patient spending in a hospital is generally based on 2 components:

Expenses related to diagnosis: Complementary biological and imaging tests
Expenses related to care: Medications and care

The impact of poverty and the indigence of the patients will weigh as much on one component as on the other. The patients will only agree to undergo an examination if they are convinced that it will bring vital information. Similarly, among the prescribed drugs and treatments, they will spend only on what seems to them vital in the immediate future or essential to save a life in the short term. The direct consequence is an increase in morbidity and mortality, and an increase in costs per relapse and re-hospitalization, frustration, etc.

There is, therefore, a major problem in the practice of medicine in poor areas:

How do we convince the patient it is worth their money?
How do we make them realize the degree of urgency and dangerousness of the pathology?

It is recognized worldwide that an image is worth a thousand words and images are what ultrasound offers us.

The whole world is learning a little more every day to appreciate the diagnostic and therapeutic value of ultrasound, but one of the most impactful elements that can be achieved with ultrasound is communication, the transmission of information.

The disease is no longer just abstract. We can show it to the patient, we can see his eyes fill with gratitude when he finally manages to see what is hurting him, what has caused him so much worry. We go from the abstract to the concrete.

If this is already a plus in developed societies where the patient wants to satisfy his curiosity, get information, and understand, in underdeveloped countries a new aspect emerges. The patient can see what he is going to spend his money on, why he will pay for transport from a village to the city to see a specialist or carry out an expensive examination, why he will accept that a needle is inserted into his body, why his stomach will be opened.

Ultrasound can literally boost compliance with treatment and it seems to be magic that the benefits of ultrasound are the same regardless of the environment.

To illustrate my remarks, I present to you a 50-year-old patient, with high blood sugar levels for 3 years, which was not monitored because she believed that she could control this with plants and bark. On examination, we found a painful epigastric mass in the left hypochondrium, which was mobile with respiration. The ultrasound found a voluminous left renal abscess. Thanks to the ultrasound image, and the comparison of the two kidneys, I was able to convince the patient to travel to the city, to pay for an abdominal CT-Scan (the price of which represents her wage over 4 months) and to undergo ultrasound-guided percutaneous drainage (Figure 1).

Figure 1. Left, Ultrasound image of the left renal abscess and a normal right kidney.

Figure 1. Right, CT scan of the left renal abscess and the normal right kidney.

The benefits of communication with ultrasound are even greater when it comes to point-of-care ultrasound (POCUS). You are the examining doctor, you tell the patient what you suspect, you scan their body to answer the questions you have asked, and when you have the answer, it is a moment of bonding and complicity between you and the patient that only those who use POCUS can understand. BEAUTIFUL!!!

Any doctor practicing in rural areas, remote areas, or poor areas should learn to do POCUS. With online learning, everything is accessible now. Free or inexpensive online courses and scholarships for developing world doctors should be strongly encouraged. Ultrasound societies must look into offering such content. Universities should as well because the future of health will develop with POCUS.

If we want to help poor countries progress, knowledge sharing must be at the center of the priorities. We need to take into account inequalities that result in health personnel who most need POCUS are also those who are not able to afford training whether online or face-to-face. It is necessary to ensure that there are elite developing-world doctors who have mastered POCUS, and who will be able to teach it to others and thus participate in the popularization of ultrasound.

Let’s democratize ultrasound, and save lives.

Yannick Ndefo, MD, is a general practitioner in Cameroon and a POCUS ambassador for POCUS Certification Academy.

POCUS in Primary Care: Advice for Incorporating Ultrasound into the Clinic

Posted on July 27, 2021 by aium1952

The utility of point-of-care ultrasound (POCUS) is readily apparent in a busy Emergency Department (ED) or Intensive Care Unit. Now, as healthcare in the U.S. changes and decentralizes, widespread POCUS in primary care is poised to show its value to medical systems in a way that will eclipse its impressive origins in hospitals. However, there are many reasons primary care ultrasound hasn’t taken off…yet. Among them is that effectively incorporating POCUS into a clinic can be hard work with many upfront challenges. The following is some advice on overcoming these challenges, focusing on 3 areas.

Determine your desired scope of practice and manage expectations
Get really good at POCUS
Optimize your clinic POCUS workflow

1. Determine your desired scope of practice and manage expectations

Learning to use ultrasound is very similar to learning a musical instrument—you don’t jump in with Chopin, you start off by playing Chopsticks or practicing chords. When determining their intended POCUS scope of practice, outpatient clinicians need to consider that the things they are most interested in doing right away might be some of the more technically demanding or challenging things to learn. Here are some good examples of common outpatient POCUS goals and more appropriate starting points for beginners:

Body Region	Aspirational POCUS Application	Appropriate POCUS Starting Point
Abdominal	Gallstones, Cirrhosis, Appendicitis	Ascites
Cardiac	LVH, Pulmonary Hypertension	Pericardial Effusion
Pulmonary	Pneumonia	Pleural Effusions and Pulmonary Edema
Musculoskeletal	Rotator Cuff Tears	Knee Effusion

Furthermore, even if you appropriately start small and easy, chances are you will at some point perceive that you are terrible. This is normal and experienced by many POCUS experts when they first started. Keep at it, and ensure you have a marathoner’s mindset; remember it’s no quick sprint and requires a stepwise approach. You can learn more about a specific approach to teaching and a framework for growing a POCUS skillset for generalists (PEARLS) by watching the AIUM webinar, “PEARLS: A Physical Exam with Pocket Sized Ultrasound for Routine Use,” here: https://youtu.be/ywuIeoEfG1I

2. Get really good at POCUS

Easy as that, right? Unfortunately, learning POCUS in the clinic is HARDER than learning POCUS in the hospital setting. The time constraints are just as bad as in the ED and, generally, the pathology is much less frequent and more subtle when present. Obtaining cardiac windows in the patient who can’t get out of their wheelchair or rollator let alone climb up to the exam table is not an uncommon circumstance. So how do you get really good under these circumstances? Three key interconnected principles dominate the philosophy we try to instill in our learners as part of our training:

Scan Routinely
Practice Deliberately
Track Your Experience (Build Your Portfolio)

Scan Routinely is probably the most controversial of these, and for me, also the most important. The routine performance of “educational” scans during residency, fellowship, or other training period is the bedrock for successful training and is generally accepted in the POCUS community. This allows one to practice deliberately and pursue a path towards mastery.

The number 1 biggest mistake I see in the early plateaued POCUS learner is they are only performing scans if they feel it is clinically indicated or they have a specific clinical question they expect POCUS to help them answer. If you are not routinely using POCUS you will likely not achieve or maintain the experience where your POCUS skillset will be clinically useful to you.

My threshold for incorporating ultrasound into my evaluation of patients is probably much lower than other POCUS users, and my experience has been that this has helped me tremendously. This experience has supported the perspective that POCUS should be viewed as a vital clinical skill to be perpetually maintained and improved upon, not a separate and distinct diagnostic test to be brought out only when patients fit into narrow predefined boxes.

Finally, even if you do not incorporate images into the EMR or bill for your exams (and there are many reasons why you should not do this early on), you should routinely save your images and build a portfolio. Committing your interpretations to a log, on paper or electronically, allows you to attain vital feedback through your longitudinal experience and patient follow-up. It also allows you to more easily seek expert mentorship, teach others, and can serve as inspiration if your motivation or progress seems to drop off.

3. Optimize your clinic POCUS workflow

Like many aspects of clinic, part of optimizing your POCUS workflow involves training your staff. In many ways, it helps to treat the POCUS device like the clinic EKG machine. If you know you will likely include POCUS because of the chief complaint (eg, dyspnea, flank pain, or lower extremity swelling) have staff put the patient in the most suitable room and ensure they are properly undressed/draped in advance. Train staff to be comfortable handling the device, cleaning it, and setting it up in the room with patient information entered in (if applicable). If you unexpectedly determine POCUS is needed during an encounter but setup is suboptimal, see another patient while the patient and room are prepared. Also, consider restructuring how you examine patients. Often time constraints do not permit the traditional order of history -> traditional examination -> ultrasound examination, and you will be more efficient by incorporating ultrasound sooner and blending history and pertinent traditional exam maneuvers along the way.

Finally, when first starting off, when incorporating routine scanning into your workflow, keep a narrow focus and a set time limit (<5 minutes). Don’t be shy about using an alarm on your phone to keep yourself honest. You may need to focus on obtaining a single high-quality view, and then add additional views as you’re able while still staying under time. Taking 20 minutes to perform POCUS in the middle of a packed clinic is another common mistake that can torpedo a workday and create negative associations that increase reluctance to practice and utilize POCUS.

Once you obtain some basic skills at POCUS and have a good clinic workflow, you’ll quickly get a few early saves and successes that enhance your dedication and propel you forward. Before long, you will wonder how you ever did without it!

Mike Wagner is looking to the camera while semi recumbent on a patient bed. He is holding an ultrasound transducer in his right hand and his pants leg has been pulled up to bare his knee. — Mike Wagner, MD, FACP, FAIUM, during a remote/virtual teaching session.

Mike Wagner, MD, FACP, FAIUM, is an Associate Professor of Medicine at the University of South Carolina School of Medicine in Greenville.

Want to learn more from Mike Wagner? Check out these resources from the American Institute of Ultrasound in Medicine:

On-demand webinar on YouTube: COVID-19: Advanced Applications of Lung Ultrasound: Viral Pneumonia and Acute Respiratory Distress Syndrome (ARDS)
Article in the Journal of Ultrasound in Medicine (JUM): A Primary Care Ultrasound Fellowship: Training for Clinical Practice and Future Educators
Article in the JUM: Prevalence and Scope of Point-of-Care Ultrasound Education in Internal Medicine, Pediatric, and Medicine-Pediatric Residency Programs in the United States

Sink or Swim? Modifying POCUS Medical Education Curriculum During the Coronavirus Pandemic

Posted on April 6, 2021 by aium1952

Modifying a point-of-care ultrasound (POCUS) medical education curriculum initially designed for 4-year matriculation into a 3-year experience is undoubtedly challenging. This 1-year shortening, combined with the added constraints of mandated social distancing guidelines of the coronavirus pandemic, caused us to search for concrete answers to these new directives that would lead us to either sink or swim in this new ocean of learning.

Claude Bernard, a 19th-century French physiologist, remarked that “it is what we think we know already that often prevents us from learning.” This educational concept was true with our efforts to modify a successful ultrasound in medical education curriculum and transform it into a case-based learning approach for a condensed 18-month pre-clerkship ultrasound curriculum.

How we had conducted ultrasound labs previously would have to be revisited, revised, and revamped to transform the curriculum successfully.

Planning began to modify the ultrasound curriculum for the 18-month pre-clerkship experience approximately 2 years before the pandemic was even on the horizon. In-person meetings were held with fellow faculty to discuss and debate the patient-centered learning course’s mission and goals and where the ultrasound curriculum would be housed. Our discussions took place with ease, and ideas for collaboration easily flowed. Plans were made for in-person, hands-on scanning where students scanned each other, volunteers, or standardized patients, without giving any thought to the physical contact.

There was no thought to the exam rooms’ square footage or how students would enter and exit the ultrasound center. Live introductory lectures at the onset of each lab were planned for 25–30 students to introduce the case and review the scanning techniques and logistics for each lab session. The planning included no discussion of online learning or simulated scanning for students from a remote location. Ultrasound instruction would proceed into the new curriculum with a slight modification to how ultrasound content had been previously delivered.

Then, while finalizing our plans for a start date of August 2020, all in-person instruction was suspended for our institution. It was mid-March, and we had a nearly solidified sketch of the ultrasound lab logistics and learning methods for the inaugural class of the 3-year medical school and the 18-month pre-clerkship curriculum.

Nevertheless, that suddenly changed, and the uncertainty of instructing anyone in-person to do any part of the curriculum was up for discussion. The faculty was mandated to work from home away from the ultrasound center with its hand-held systems, full-size ultrasound machines, and simulation capabilities. Student interactions were reduced to phone calls, emails, and video interactions within online course offerings as each student cohort was scattered throughout the 159 counties of our state.

Learning to conduct curriculum meetings through online platforms filled our days. Trying to accomplish fully online ultrasound electives with a plethora of students and revamp the new ultrasound curriculum within the changing coronavirus guidelines stayed on our minds as we struggled through the spring and early summer.

Nevertheless, we made it!

When the inaugural class of the new pre-clerkship curriculum began, we laid out a plan to keep students, staff, and faculty safe through the 3W’s: wearing a mask, watching physical distance, and hand washing.

Facilities management personnel had surveyed our ultrasound exam rooms and learning spaces and posted how many students could be in each room. Hand sanitation stations and masks were made available for students as they entered the ultrasound center. Signage and arrows were erected to direct students in and out of the ultrasound center in a one-way fashion. An online meeting platform was set up in each exam room for students to hear live instruction before beginning the lab. Instructors utilized a laser point at each room’s door to direct student scanning and maintain social distancing. Students used hand-held ultrasound equipment with image transfer capabilities to obtain images needed to complete their online case-based ultrasound assignments. Although these safety measures were not visualized in our early curriculum planning meetings, the ultrasound curriculum was successfully delivered!

While we did not meet the goal of remote hands-on ultrasound instruction for all ultrasound labs during the pandemic, we learned to conduct in-person ultrasound scanning labs safely and effectively within a new accelerated medical school curriculum. The constraints and trials of a global pandemic did not preclude us from putting aside what we already knew and navigating a new course into the future!

Rebecca J. Etheridge, EdD, RDMS, is an assistant professor at the Medical College of Georgia at Augusta University.

Interested in learning more about ultrasound education? Check out the following posts from the Scan:

Using AI and Ultrasound to Diagnose COVID-19 Faster

Posted on August 11, 2020 by aium1952

Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) is a newly identified virus that has caused a recent outbreak of respiratory illnesses starting from an isolated event to a global pandemic. As of July 2020, there are over 2.8 million confirmed COVID-19 cases in the U.S. and over 11.4 million worldwide. In the United States alone, over 130,000 Americans have died from COVID-19, with no end in sight. A major cause of this rapid and seemingly endless expansion can be traced back to the inefficiency and shortage of testing kits that offer accurate results in a timely manner. The lack of optimized tools necessary for rapid mass testing produces a ripple effect that includes the health of your loved ones, jobs, education, and on the national level, a country’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP), but artificial intelligence and ultrasound may help.

STATE OF ART IN DIAGNOSIS

Prof. Alper Yilmaz, PhD Currently, there are two types of tests that are conducted by healthcare professionals–diagnostic tests and antibody tests. The diagnostic test, as the name implies, helps diagnose an active coronavirus infection in a patient. The ideal diagnostic test and the “gold standard” according to the United States Center for Disease Control (CDC) is the Reverse Transcription Polymerase Chain Reaction, or simply, RT-PCR. RT-PCR is a molecular test not only capable of diagnosing an active coronavirus infection, but it can also indicate whether the patient has ever had COVID-19 or were infected with the coronavirus in the past. However, the time required to conduct the test limits its effectiveness when mass deployed.

A much faster but less reliable diagnostic test alternative to RT-PCR is an antigen test. Much like the gold standard, the antigen test is capable of detecting an active coronavirus infection in a much shorter timeframe. Although antigen tests produce rapid results, usually in about an hour, the results are deemed highly unreliable, especially with patients who were tested negative according to the US FDA.

In contrast, the antibody test is designed to search for antibodies produced by the immune system of a patient in response to the virus and is limited by its ability to only detect past infections, which is less than ideal to prevent an ongoing pandemic.

THE PROBLEM

To combat the rapid expansion of an airborne virus such as COVID-19, or future variations of a similar virus, rapid and reliable solutions must be developed that aim at improving the limitations of current methods. Although highly accurate, methods such as RT-PCR do not meet the speed requirements needed for testing on a large scale. Depending on the location, diagnosis of an active coronavirus infection with RT-PCR may take anywhere between several hours and up to a week. When the number of daily human-to-human interactions are considered, the lack of speed in diagnosing an active coronavirus patient could be the difference between a pandemic or an isolated local event.

As an alternative to molecular tests, Computed Tomography (CT) scans of a patient’s chest have shown promising results in detecting an infection. However, in addition to not being recommended by the CDC to diagnose COVID-19 patients, there are many unwanted consequences with the use of CT scans. With CT scans used to diagnose multiple illnesses, some of which relate to serious emergencies such as brain hemorrhaging, they cannot be used as the primary tool for diagnosing COVID-19. This is especially true in rural areas where the healthcare infrastructure is underfunded. Mainly due to the required deep cleaning of the machine and room after each patient, which usually requires 60 to 120 minutes, many institutions are unable to provide CT scans as a viable primary diagnostic tool. Ultimately, given the need for CT scanners for several other health complications combined with limited patient capacity at each hospital, alternative methods must be developed to diagnose an active coronavirus patient.

THE SOLUTION

Recently Point-of-Care (POC) devices have started to be adopted by many healthcare professionals due to its reliability and portability. An emerging popular technique, which adopts improvements made in mobile ultrasound technology, allows for healthcare professionals to conduct rapid screenings on a large scale.

Working since mid-March, when early cases of physicians adopting mobile ultrasound technology emerged, the research team at The Ohio State University, Dr. Alper Yilmaz and PhD student Shehan Perera, started developing a solution that can automate an already well-established process. Dr. Yilmaz is the director of the Photogrammetric Computer Vision lab at Ohio State. Dr. Yilmaz’s expertise in machine learning, artificial intelligence, and computer vision combined with the research experience of Shehan Perera laid a strong foundation to tackle the problem at hand. As it stands, the screening of a new patient, with the use of a mobile ultrasound device takes about 13 minutes, with the caveat that it requires a highly trained professional to interpret the results generated by the device. With the combination of deep learning and computer vision, the research team was able to use data generated from the ultrasound device to accurately identify COVID-19 cases. The current network architecture, which is the product of many iterations, is capable of detecting the presence of the virus in a patient with a high level of accuracy.

Many fields have been revolutionized with modern deep learning and computer vision technologies. With the methods developed by the research team, this technology can now allow any untrained worker to use a handheld ultrasound device, and still be able to provide a service that rivals that of a highly trained doctor. In addition to being extremely accurate, the automated detection and diagnosis process takes less than 10 minutes, which includes scanning time, and sanitation is as simple as removing a plastic seal that covers the device. The benefits of this technology can not only be useful for countries such as the United States, with a well-established healthcare system, but, more importantly, can significantly help countries and areas where medical expertise is rare.

CONCLUSION

The United States healthcare system is among the best in the world, yet we are failing to provide the necessary treatment patients clearly need. The developments made in artificial intelligence, deep learning, and computer vision offer proven benefits, which can not only be leveraged to improve the current state of the global pandemic but can lay the foundation to prevent the next. Alternative testing methods such as mobile ultrasound devices combined with novel artificial intelligence algorithms that allow for mass production, distribution, and testing could be the innovation that could help decelerate the spread of the virus, reducing the strain on the global healthcare infrastructure.

Feel Free to Reach the Authors at:

Photogrammetric Computer Vision Lab – https://pcvlab.engineering.osu.edu/
Dr. Alper Yilmaz, PhD
Email: Yilmaz.15@osu.du
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/alper-yilmaz

Shehan Perera
Email: Perera.27@osu.edu
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/shehanp/

References

https://www.fda.gov/consumers/consumer-updates/coronavirus-testing-basics

https://www.whitehouse.gov/articles/depth-look-COVID-19s-early-effects-consumer-spending-gdp/#:~:text=BEA%20estimates%20that%20real%20GDP,first%20decline%20in%20six%20years.&text=This%20drop%20in%20GDP%20serves,in%20response%20to%20COVID%2D19.

Interested in learning more about COVID-19 or AI? Check out the following posts from the Scan:

No Words Are Strong Enough

Posted on July 14, 2020 by aium1952

Low- and middle-income countries have always faced major health difficulties related to lack of human resources, facilities, and access to drinking water and electricity. Added to these factors are the lack of a suitable road, geographical remoteness, and poverty. Hence, the management of patients is compromised both diagnostically and therapeutically.

IMG_20200513_125259_B

Point-of-care ultrasound (POCUS) offers wide possibilities to health professionals who work in areas with limited resources by means of the portable machine with a good battery. Therefore it is possible for the clinician to go to low- and middle-income countries to dispense quality care services on the spot while giving access to diagnostics and guiding the management and emergency invasive procedures. IMG_20200513_100229

As a primary care physician, I was trained on clinical ultrasound through the Canadian platform in the emergency unit. I use it in my routine practice as part of my physical exam with my patients, which greatly increases my precision. No words are strong enough to describe how we feel when we examine a young woman who consults for severe pelvic pains associated with metrorrhagia and we suspect an ectopic pregnancy and the B-HCG urine test comes out positive, so you grab your US probe and you find an empty uterus, a hemoperitoneum. The fact that you saw the patient’s interior and were to be able to show her what exactly is wrong…. It’s a strength beyond what the words can explain, the precise diagnosis is reliable and prompt.

Once a month, I travel to Yabassi, a small village surrounded by a forest in the littoral region of Cameroon, which is difficult to access and rarely supplied with electricity, to do ultrasound for pregnant women discouraged by the bad state of the road and the distance to reach the nearest town. I help them meet their babies for the first time and I enable adequate follow up for the pregnancy and prevent certain complications that might occur during the delivery.

With a minimum of 1 doctor for 30,000 people, it is imperative for the clinician to go to the patients and not the reverse. And POCUS can help in these situations because of its ability to save the images to be shown to other experts for their expertise if needed. Ultrasound offers immense possibilities in upper-income countries, and I think it’s even more important in low- and middle-income countries to have access to that highly efficient and accessible method, to greatly improve the management of patients while offering quality healthcare at a low cost.

Yannick Ndefo, MD, is a general practitioner at St Thomas hospital in Douala, Cameroon.

Interested in learning more about ultrasound in low-resource settings? Check out the following posts from the Scan:

POCUS: My Path to Being an Effective Global Citizen, by Gigi Liu, MD, MSc, FACP
Sonography and the Seeds of Education in Underserved Rural Clinics, by Tammy Stearns, MS, RT(R), RDMS, RVT, FSDMS
Ultrasound at 18,000 ft., by Laura Nolting, MD, FACEP
The Democratization of Point-of-Care Ultrasound, by Jonathan Monti, PA-C, RDMS
Clinical Tests Worldwide, by Jordan Rupp, MD, RDMS
7 Tips for Scanning Overseas, by “Ted” Kuhn, MD

Novice to Competence to Understanding Our Role as POCUS Educators

Posted on December 3, 2019 by aium1952

Nights at the VA medical ICU could get lonely sometimes. When the hubbub of the day had drawn down and the critical care fellows had gone home, the work in the ICUs slowed. Headshot_kevin piro

I figured that I would make use of the time that had seemingly stopped. I grabbed the ultrasound and went to scan and chat with a friendly gentleman whom I had admitted the previous night. It became readily apparent that I was still a struggling learner at this point in my training. There was something that looked like cardiac motion, but not resembling anything like the diagrams and videos I had looked at on my own. It was an uncomfortable place to be.

I imagine that is where a lot of people get frustrated and stop, especially when they don’t have someone to encourage and nurture their continued practice. I had a different luxury. Just a few weeks prior, I had received an inquiry about participating in a new general medicine POCUS fellowship at Oregon Health & Science University, and I was instantly sold on its potential. Here was a chance to carve out a new path and to invest in a skill that offered me a skillset that could improve my patient care. And I knew that I would have the benefit of POCUS experts literally holding my hand as I learned the skill. What a luxury!

So, I kept scanning in the ICU prior to my fellowship. You know what I found? Patients are much more forgiving than we might imagine them to be. Most understand that hospitals are frequently places of learning and like to be engaged in the process and, as I stumbled through my next few exams, I was reminded of my Dad’s words of encouragement, “the only difference between you and an expert is that they have done it once or twice.” So I kept at it. I was terrible the next times too. But, it got easier and I felt less intimated with each scan I performed. By the time I hit fellowship, I was already moving in the right direction.

When I started my POCUS fellowship, I was fortunate to work with all sorts of supportive colleagues that allowed me to continue to grow. Where I had struggled to build a foundation on my own, colleagues collected from internists, sonographers, and EM physicians provided me with the scaffolding. They provided me with lessons. “Remember, air is the enemy of ultrasound” and “ultrasound does not give you permission to turn your brain off. It is a problem-solving tool.” They entertained clinical application questions. They gave back when I leaned in. These colleagues were an amazing support network and would help me construct the mosaic that I teach from now.

A few months into the fellowship, I could complete a competent exam comfortably. It came together one day for me when I completed a Cardiovascular Limited Ultrasound Exam (CLUE) on a pleasantly demented older man, who had shortness of breath likely representing heart failure. As I looked at his lungs, taking stock of the bilateral B-lines and pleural effusions that confirmed his diagnosis, I discussed and showed the findings with his daughter.

“This makes so much sense now!” she remarked. The lightbulb went on for her as I democratized her father’s clinical information. The lightbulb came on for me too as I had a sense of satisfaction of both feeling confident in my diagnosis, but also being better able to teach and engage a family in their medical care. My transformation from novice to competency was mostly complete.

Now, a little more than 2 years removed from my fellowship, I have a little more perspective on the road from novice to competency, not only from my personal experience but also from my opportunity to network with an amazing group of enthusiastic (IM) POCUS educators.

These educators are largely trained by their own curiosity, their attendance at POCUS CME courses, or by latching onto experts from peripheral medical departments. In essence, these educators are pulling themselves up by their own bootstraps in a time when there is a distinct scarcity of POCUS educators within Internal Medicine, which can leave the supposed “all-knowledgeable” physician in an uncomfortable place of vulnerability. They have shared the angst that POCUS is a particularly challenging skill to learn due to its humbling nature – we may not know how badly we were hearing murmurs as medical students, but I bet most learners can guess by looking at a picture how poorly they are doing when they are scanning. It was a feeling I shared back in the ICU as a resident, but our experiences diverged when I had mentors who invested in me learning this valuable skill.

But, these physicians who learned POCUS independently are now at the next, even harder, part. As new leaders, we must reach behind us and pull up the trainees, whether that be by creating the next POCUS fellowship, starting or improving a residency POCUS program, or simply training your fellow colleague. We are tasked with making new learners feel supported and encouraged, and to make this technology accessible in fields where POCUS is not the standard of care. We need to foster these learners’ growth so that they can arrive at their own lightbulb moment and so they keep scanning on the ICUs in the effort to improve the care they deliver.

What was your defining moment in your decision to go into ultrasound? Have you had a unique learning experience? Comment below, or, AIUM members, continue the conversation on Connect, the AIUM’s online community to share your experience.

Kevin M. Piro, MD, participated in and helped build a point-of-care ultrasound fellowship at Oregon Health & Science University (OHSU), becoming only the second general medicine-focused ultrasound fellowship in the nation. Dr Piro is now a hospitalist at OHSU.

Who Owns POCUS?

Posted on November 19, 2019 by aium1952

The debate over point-of-care ultrasound (POCUS) governance was rekindled recently when the Canadian Association of Radiologists published a POCUS position statement. The statement rankled some prominent POCUS leaders who hotly debated the statement’s merit via Twitter. This is a debate certainly worth having, but it is hardly a new one. Some likened it to the “turf battles” that emergency physicians successfully overcame well over a decade ago. To be clear, there is a governance problem, largely the result of technology/machine availability outpacing the development of POCUS training, credentialing, and employment guidelines and standards. Referring to the POCUS realm as the “wild, wild west” as Zwank and colleagues did, is somewhat apropos. But to develop the best solutions, we must first define the problem. empty conference room

The problem – “who”…or “how”? The statement seems to frame the problem around who is best qualified to govern POCUS. Most would agree that radiologists are imaging experts with the most training in interpreting ultrasound. But if using Bahner’s popular I-AIM framework, the image interpretation that most radiologists practice is only one aspect of POCUS. POCUS is a separate entity from consultative ultrasound. Clinician-performed at the point of care, POCUS has different goals, primary of which is to answer focused questions that guide and expedite proper definitive care. Its versatility allows it to be employed well outside of the domain of traditional diagnostic ultrasound, enhancing the safety of bedside procedures, improving the physical exam, and directing further testing & timely care. But when did you last see a radiologist at the bedside of a patient outside of the interventional radiology (IR) suite…one willing to personally “clinically correlate” the image findings rather than just include the phrase in their report?

Rhetorical questions aside, if we lived in a perfect and resource-rich world, we might all be able to dedicate a full year to the performance of ultrasound, or even better, radiologists would come to the bedside to perform the exam within minutes of the order. But we don’t. Fortunately, there’s already quite a bit of data suggesting that the requisite training for non-radiologists to safely employ POCUS isn’t as extensive as some might have us think. Additionally, the American Medical Association’s resolution (AMA HR. 802) long ago recommended that training and education standards for the employment of ultrasound be developed by each physician’s respective specialty society, effectively recognizing the importance of self-governance of this modality. I would argue that the problem, therefore, centers less around the “who” and more around the “how” of governance.

Practical solutions – Interprofessional collaboration is key: The desire to ensure patient safety is the common ground here. We all want to ensure POCUS is safely employed, but how do we best do so? Training and utilization standards can ensure this, but overly restrictive standards can create unnecessary barriers that limit POCUS employment and prevent patients from reaping the demonstrated benefits of POCUS. The radiology specialty undoubtedly has a wealth of valuable expertise to contribute to this debate. Their well-established and validated training and imaging standards could well-serve as a framework upon which POCUS standards could be built and certainly makes them deserving of a seat at the table. But given how and where POCUS is employed, surely the clinicians doing so deserve a seat also. To suggest that “non-imagers” are incapable of developing rigorous, evidence-based training and utilization standards that allow for the safe employment of POCUS simply isn’t fair, nor is it well-substantiated, if we’re using emergency physicians as an example.

Furthermore, unilaterally developed statements such as this are what drive us to remain in our respective silos and can hinder the progress still required in this realm. The solution is a collaborative one, considerate and respectful of the diagnostic ultrasound knowledge and experience of imaging experts, the setting in which POCUS is employed, and the variety of ways clinicians can capably employ it to enhance patient care at the bedside. This collaborative concept isn’t mine, nor is it new, thankfully (more thoughtful discourse on the topic can be found here and here). It’s time that we recognize and leverage the talent that each discipline can offer toward the safe, effective employment of POCUS. It’s time to embrace interdisciplinary and interprofessional collaboration.

The inherent value of POCUS lies in its ability to transcend clinical specialties, settings, and practice scopes. It is distinctly different from consultative ultrasound and therefore shouldn’t be bound by standards created long before POCUS existed. It is a valuable, patient-centered adjunct that demands new standards that are 1) considerate of both its versatility and the multitude of settings in which it can be employed, 2) considerate of the experience of those who have previously employed US, and 3) created by all those actively employing it to enhance the care they directly provide at the bedside. But rest assured, ultrasound no longer belongs only to radiologists, or any one specialty/profession for that matter, and that’s a good thing.

Have you integrated a collaboratively developed approach to POCUS training and/or utilization? Comment below, or, AIUM members, continue the conversation on Connect, the AIUM’s online community to share your experience.

Jonathan Monti, DSc, PA-C, RDMS, is an Associate Professor of the US Army / Baylor EMPA Residency Program at Madigan Army Medical Center and President of the Society of Point-of-Care Ultrasound (SPOCUS). He is actively engaged in research that assesses POCUS training and its unconventional employment by a myriad of users.

The Scan

The official blog of the AIUM

Tag Archives: point-of-care ultrasound