Perioperative Point of Care Ultrasound (POCUS) for Anesthesiologists: an Overview

This article provides a brief overview of the indications, techniques for image acquisition, and general principles in interpreting basic images.Recent FindingsWhole-body POCUS can provide quick diagnoses and impact clinical management across relevant pre-, intra-, and post-operative settings. Anesthesia providers need to understand different applications for POCUS, including focused cardiac ultrasound (FoCUS), lung ultrasound (LUS), gastric ultrasound, abdominopelvic ultrasound, and the use of ultrasound for airway management. Currently, there is no standard ultrasound curriculum for anesthesiology residents, and teaching methods include informal bedside teaching, structured expert demonstration, didactic lectures, and simulations. Model/simulation-based lecture series may be effective in teaching ultrasound to anesthesiology residents, and e-learning and traditional didactics are both equally effective in teaching POCUS applications such as LUS and focused assessment with sonography in trauma (FAST). Creating protocol-guided frameworks for POCUS, such as I-AIM (indication, acquisition, interpretation, medical decision making), can also ensure more consistent and reliable diagnoses and interpretations of findings.SummaryApplications of POCUS should be focused, goal-oriented, easily learned, rapidly performable at bedside, accurate, and reliable. A variety of studies have shown this potential for POCUS in assessing cardiac, pulmonary, and intraabdominal pathologies, making it...
Source: Current Pain and Headache Reports - Category: Neurology Source Type: research