• Peter E Croft, Tania D Strout, Randy M Kring, Laura Director, Samip C Vasaiwala, and David C Mackenzie.
• Department of Emergency Medicine, Maine Medical Center, Portland, ME, United States of America; Tufts University School of Medicine, Boston, MA, United States of America. Electronic address: croftp@mmc.org.
• Am J Emerg Med. 2019 Dec 1; 37 (12): 2224-2228.

ObjectiveThe ability to identify wall motion abnormalities may be useful for emergency clinicians, but is not typically evaluated in point-of-care echocardiograms. We sought to determine if emergency physicians with basic training in emergency echocardiography could identify regional wall motion abnormalities (RWMA) in patients admitted with ST-elevation myocardial infarction (STEMI).MethodsWe prospectively enrolled patients with admitted with STEMI. Resident physicians with basic training in emergency ultrasound, blinded to other patient data, performed a point-of-care echocardiogram to evaluate for RWMA. If present, they also recorded the suspected territory of the RWMA. We calculated test performance characteristics and compared the agreement between point-of-care and comprehensive echocardiogram for RWMA and territory.Results75 patients with STEMI were enrolled, and 62% had a RMWA. RWMA were identified with excellent test performance characteristics (sensitivity 88% (95% CI 75-96); specificity 92% (95% CI 75-99)). There was substantial agreement between the point-of-care echocardiogram and reference standard (K = 0.79; 95% CI: 0.64-0.94).ConclusionsEmergency physicians with core training in point-of-care echocardiography can accurately identify RMWA.Copyright © 2019 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

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