POCUS Profile: Dr. Fidel Fernandez
Ultrasound is a vital tool for vascular surgeons in the 21st century. In the following essay, Dr. Fidel Fernández Quesada, a sixth-generation vascular surgeon and associate professor at the University of Granada, Spain, describes the difference that ultrasound has made to his clinical practice, and reflects on what his forefathers would have made of such technological advancement."I have worked in the field of angiology and vascular surgery for 25 years, and currently practice both at the San Cecilio University Hospital in Granada and privately. I am also the current president of the…
A Return to Mosul: Sonosite Ultrasound Delivered to Al Khansaa Hospital
Fulfilling a Promise to Mosul’s Premier Hospital for Women and Children
Mosul, Iraq’s second largest city, is slowly rebuilding its healthcare infrastructure after years of war and destruction.
Dr. Henryk Pich spent time travelling in the Middle East as a young man. Not surprisingly, he feels a personal connection to the region and, after seeing the devastation caused by years of war to cities such as Mosul, wanted to offer whatever help he could. Moved by the makeshift treatment centers he witnessed in the hospital ruins, he promised the skeleton team of local doctors at the pediatric…
Disaster Relief Team Borrows Ultrasound for Flood Victims
During recent floods in the southern Indian province of Kerala, the Kerala Flood Disaster relief team sent by Kasturba Medical College, Manipal borrowed a Sonosite M-Turbo ultrasound machine to assist in assessing and triaging flood victims.
The team arrived in Chengannur, one of the worst-afflicted areas of the flood zone, and began working at the District Hospital.
Dr. Jayaraj Balakrishnan, Professor and Head of Emergency Medicine at Kasturba Medical College, reported that the machine was used to assess roughly 570 flood victims who were treated in the District Hospital. He sent…
POCUS Profile: Dr. Ilyas Tugtekin
Dr. Ilyas Tugtekin, a consultant anesthetist from Ulm University Medical Center in Baden-Württemberg, Germany, travels to Kumasi, Ghana to help establish an ultrasound training center for doctors all over West Africa.
Funded by the Else Kröner-Fresenius Foundation – a non-profit organization dedicated to supporting medical research and related humanitarian projects – a team of five specialists spent a week at Ghana’s second largest hospital, the 1,000-bed Komfo Anokye Teaching Hospital (KATH) in Kumasi, teaching ultrasound-guided techniques, including POCUS-guided regional nerve blocks…
Four Ways Ultra-Portable Ultrasound Provides Fast Answers For Superbike Racing
Motorsports are risky, so employing an experienced medical response team is crucial. FUJIFILM Sonosite recently became an Official Supplier of the Bennetts British Superbike Championship (BSB) 2018, and the Sonosite iViz became a valuable addition to the medical team’s toolbox for enabling rapid assessment to help triage injuries and identify complex medical conditions, either at the trackside or in the mobile clinic.
So how does the Sonosite iViz fit into this carefully choreographed medical response? Here are four ways the Sonosite iViz contributes to excellent…
POCUS Profile: Dr. José Luis Vázquez Martínez
Doctors working in the eight-bed Pediatric Intensive Care Unit at the Ramón y Cajal University Hospital in Madrid use point-of-care ultrasound extensively to evaluate the condition of critically ill children, and find it essential to their work. Dr. José Luis Vázquez Martínez, Head of Post-Surgical Critical Care at Hospital Ramón y Cajal has over 25 years’ experience in pediatric intensive care medicine. He recently described how his department uses ultrasound with some of the smallest patients.
"Point-of-care ultrasound (POCUS) is used extensively in our unit, allowing comprehensive, head-…
A Letter from Dr. Samuel Abelson
The following is a letter from Dr. Samuel Abelson, an emergency medicine physician who lives in Minneapolis.Four years ago, Project Medishare began teaching point-of-care ultrasound to the staff at Hospital Bernard Mevs in Port Au Prince. Through the Sonosite Global Health program, we have borrowed multiple loaner machines to use in teaching.In 2016, Project Medishare was able to purchase a discounted M-Turbo through Sonosite SoundCaring and bring it to Haiti. This past spring, we once again were able to donate two M-Turbo ultrasound machines to the ICU/PICU staff at Hospital Bernard…
Reducing Costs and Increasing Care Quality With Ultrasound-Guided PIVs
How does ultrasound-guided vascular access improve care and reduce costs? In a new article in Axis Imaging, FUJIFILM Sonosite's Chief Medical Officer Diku Mandavia writes about how Matthew Ostroff, ARNP, a vascular access specialist at St. Joseph’s Healthcare System, a 700-bed hospital in Paterson, N.J., chartered St. Joseph's recently implemented ultrasound-guided vascular access program in its emergency department, which ranks as the second busiest in the nation."Procedural ultrasound…acts as a visual GPS that allows clinicians to map the patient’s blood vessels and identify the…
When IV Insertion Seems Impossible
Any medical professional with hospital experience knows how crucial peripheral IV access can be. Getting fluids and medications into a critically ill or injured patient can make or break the effectiveness of their treatment.At the best, a “difficult stick”—that is, a patient whose veins are difficult to insert a needle into—presents a problem that involves multiple needle pricks (with increasing pain after each attempt), frustrated and flustered medical staff, and a delay in treatment. At worst, a difficult stick can mean mounting medical complications as dehydration worsens; and the eventual…
Ultrasound in Limited-Resource Settings can Help Saves Lives
Dr Ben LaBrot 2.png by Dr. Ben LaBrot, founder of Floating DoctorsRecently, while visiting the US, I went to the emergency room with a family member who was suffering some generalized complaints (chest and abdominal pain).Very soon after we got checked in, the attending physician ordered a litany of tests—a complete blood count with differential, blood clot tests (d-dimer), ESR and CRP, a metabolic panel, a liver panel, blood cultures, urinalysis, chest X-ray, ECG, abdominal ultrasound, and a medical and a surgical review. I immediately felt the challenge of practicing in a…
Hospital Continues Efforts to Reduce Opioid Over-Prescription
St. Joseph Regional Medical Center in Paterson, New Jersey has been among the forefront of medical providers who are attempting to stem the U.S. opioid addiction epidemic where it often starts: the Emergency Department.FUJIFILM Sonosite has been delighted to work with St. Joseph’s anesthetic specialists to provide ultrasound imaging at the point of care, which can help physicians locate nerves that can benefit from a nerve block. Combined with other analgesics (even traditional OTC medications like Advil), these multi-modal pain control methods have helped St. Joseph cut their opioid…
iViz Used To Investigate Schistosomiasis In Madagascar
Schistosomiasis, a disease that is common in sub-Saharan Africa, is particularly widespread in Madagascar. The Schistosoma mansoni parasite responsible for the disease is linked to fibrotic changes in the liver which can be detected using point-of-care ultrasound. Dr. Hannah Russell described how point-of-care ultrasound was put to the test in remote locations during an expedition to study the disease in Malagasy school children.
My interest in Schistosomiasis – also known as Bilharzia – and the Madagascar project began when I was a medical student, after meeting fellow student – now doctor…
Floating Doctors: Remembering a Fetal Ultrasound from Years Ago
by Dr. Ben LaBrot, founder of Floating DoctorsAs of this writing, my wife is pregnant with our first child, and the novelty has long since worn off. After looking after so many other people’s pregnancies, it’s a novel experience to be on the other end of the ultrasound probe, as it were. Complicated pregnancies are more than the miracle of creating new life—they can be a long, stressful waiting game fraught with nasty surprises, difficult challenges and uncertainty… as I now understand better than I would like.My wife and I regularly attend ultrasound appointments to check on the…
POCUS in Emergency Medicine: Dispatches from Iraqi Kurdistan
Medical imaging offers life-saving insights into patient health—and perhaps no other imaging modality is more versatile and mobile than point-of-care ultrasound. In a fascinating dispatch from the Kurdish city of Duhok in northern Iraq, Dr. Christine Butts describes how point-of-care ultrasound is an indispensable tool for emergency physicians, especially when patients arrive unconscious and with no indication of an obvious malady."The volume of patients has been high at Emergency Hospital. At the height of the war in Mosul, the physicians reported receiving more than 100 injured…
Cardiac Ultrasound: Echocardiography with Dr. Robert Arntfield
Point-of-Care Ultrasound and Echocardiography Go from "zero to scan" with this 5-part video series from Sonosite and Dr. Robert Arntfield. Learn about Doppler Principles, TEE, Stroke Volume, TAPSE, RSVP and more. Learn With Sonosite and Dr. Robert Arntfield Dr. Arntfield is a trained emergency physician, intensivist and traumatologist who is active with point of care ultrasound in all clinical areas. He is co-author of the textbook: Point-of-Care Ultrasound and is director of the critical care ultrasound program at Western University. He is a past course leader for the American…
Ultrasound Guidance for Fistula Surgery in The Gambia
Point-of-care ultrasound is a valuable tool for successful dialysis fistula surgery, allowing pre-operative mapping to find a suitable site and post operative fistula scanning to check for stenosis and adequate blood flow.
Anna Jerram, a clinical vascular scientist at the Manchester Royal Infirmary, discusses the role POC ultrasound played during a recent trip to The Gambia to provide critical fistula surgery to patients.
"The current hemodialysis provision in The Gambia is limited. The Ida Bass Kidney Foundation (IBKF) was established by Sailey Fladsrud following the death of…
Spanish NGO Cirugía Solidaria Uses M-Turbo in Kenyan Health Mission
During the Summer of 2017, a group of healthcare professionals – the majority from the Hospital Clínico Universitario Virgen de la Arrixaca (HCUVA) in Murcia, Spain – travelled to Kenya in partnership with the Spanish NGO Cirugía Solidaria.They brought along surgical equipment – from beds to lamps to scalpels – to create a first-rate hospital set-up, most of which was donated by HCUVA. FUJIFILM Sonosite was pleased to support them by supplying an M-Turbo point-of-care ultrasound system for their trip. Angela Cepero Sonosite 2017-10-02.png "Over the course of two…
Sonosite iViz on the Race Across America
The Race Across America is billed as the world’s toughest bicycle race; a non-stop, coast-to-coast, transcontinental trek from Oceanside, California to Annapolis, Maryland. Racers cycle for over 3,000 miles across 12 states of frequently arid terrain, and climb 170,000 feet through three mountain ranges, with the fastest teams finishing in just over five days, and solo racers in under eight. Dr. Rüdiger Eichholz, a consultant anesthetist at the private practice Medizi in Stuttgart (and keen amateur cyclist), joined the support crew of the winning eight-man team for 2017, armed with a…
Global Health: Fujifilm Sonosite Machines Assist Puerto Rican Recovery
Dr. Alfredo Tirado is from Florida Hospital in Orlando, and has been leading an emergency response mission in Puerto Rico to help with Hurricane Maria relief.
FUJIFILM Sonosite has contributed four M-Turbos to the medical recovery efforts, and Dr. Tirado sent us an update on his work with medical patients on the island. He is being escorted by helicopter to the most at-need regions and in the image below he is using the Sonosite iViz to perform a FAST scan on a patient.
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"Thank you for helping us give…
Global Health: The IWISH Foundation and Sonosite Ultrasound Machines in Haiti
Audrey E. Stryker, MD, an Ob/Gyn and partner at Women's Ob-Gyn, P.C., has been traveling to underdeveloped countries with Sonosite ultrasound systems since 2004. As a part of the IWISH Foundation (International Women & Infant Sustainable Healthcare), she and her colleagues recently travelled to Haiti to help train the next generation of medical professionals. This is her story."We've been traveling to underdeveloped countries since 2004, hoping to achieve a model that offers a sustainable means for countries to provide health care for their women and children. Haiti…