The Medical clinics of North America
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Abdominal point-of-care ultrasound is an essential diagnostic tool for internal medicine physicians. It can identify intraperitoneal free fluid, evaluate the liver for size, presence of steatosis, and assessment for possible cirrhosis. ⋯ In such cases, sonographic measurements may provide a more definitive diagnosis. With the proper training, these organs can be evaluated at the bedside and guide clinical decision making.
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Med. Clin. North Am. · Jan 2025
ReviewPrinciples and Practice of Internal Medicine Point-of-Care Ultrasound.
While point-of-care ultrasound (POCUS) use is expanding within Internal Medicine, basic yet important practices and key infrastructure are frequently underutilized. This is appropriately raising concerns that patients may be unintentionally harmed by POCUS. ⋯ It is also important to build infrastructure to allow for ongoing monitoring and quality assurance with an emphasis on transparency and objectivity of the clinician's POCUS findings. This will ensure the safe and effective integration of POCUS in Internal Medicine.
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Bedside point-of-care ultrasound (POCUS) has a high utility in clinical settings for scanning soft tissue-related conditions such as skin and soft tissue infections, identifying abscesses or necrotizing soft tissue infections, localization and extraction of embedded foreign bodies, and assessing hospitalized patients for sarcopenia. Regular use of POCUS in patients with soft tissue conditions can improve clinical efficiency and care.
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Errors and pitfalls associated with the performance of point-of-care ultrasound (POCUS) are common and can stem from errors in image acquisition, interpretation, and clinical integration. In this article, the author discuss the technical and cognitive mechanisms involved and propose a framework in systematically approaching potential errors in POCUS, as well as strategies to mitigate them.
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Med. Clin. North Am. · Jan 2025
ReviewBasic Cardiac Point-of-Care Ultrasound and Its Clinical Applications.
The information obtained from cardiac POCUS relies on the ability to acquire optimized images and identify errors in image acquisition. In the following, we describe basic approaches to image optimization and detail common measurements obtained by cardiac POCUS. We highlight the impact of image acquisition errors and patient anatomy on these measurements including LV/RV function, identification of RV strain, their pitfalls, and the impact of error in image acquisition and patient anatomy on their clinical interpretation or integration.