Document Type

Article

Publication Date

11-18-2010

Abstract

Ultrasonography used by practicing clinicians has been shown to be of utility in the evaluation of time-sensitive and critical illnesses in a range of environments, including pre-hospital triage, emergency department, and critical care settings. The increasing availability of light-weight, robust, user-friendly, and low-cost portable ultrasound equipment is particularly suited for use in the physically and temporally challenging environment of a multiple casualty incident (MCI). Currently established ultrasound applications used to identify potentially lethal thoracic or abdominal conditions offer a base upon which rapid, focused protocols using hand-carried emergency ultrasonography could be developed. Following a detailed review of the current use of portable ultrasonography in military and civilian MCI settings, we propose a protocol for sonographic evaluation of the chest, abdomen, vena cava, and extremities for acute triage. The protocol is two-tiered, based on the urgency and technical difficulty of the sonographic examination. In addition to utilization of well-established bedside abdominal and thoracic sonography applications, this protocol incorporates extremity assessment for long-bone fractures. Studies of the proposed protocol will need to be conducted to determine its utility in simulated and actual MCI settings.

Comments

Copyright ©1995-2014 Baishideng Publishing Group Inc. All rights reserved. Articles published by this open-access journal are distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial License, which permits use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, the use is non commercial and is otherwise in compliance with the license.

DOI

10.5312/wjo.v1.i1.10

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