We had a great meeting wrapping up this year's SAEM meeting in San Diego. We covered everything ultrasound related that happened at the meeting, including the consensus conference, US pre-course, didactics, AEUS meeting, SonoGames 2015, and best research abstracts.
We had another great combined AEUS-SonoRoundtable Journal Club, reviewing Blehar DJ, Barton B, Gaspari RJ. Learning Curves in Emergency Ultrasound Education. Acad Emerg Med. 2015.
Julie St-Cyr Bourque and Brooke Hensley, the ultrasound fellows from Mass General, coordinated our critical review. They did an excellent job reviewing the methods, results, and discussing the findings of the study. Different learning curves were generated for each of the ACEP core ultrasound applications, and plateau points were defined for each study.
Dave Blehar and Romolo Gaspari, two of the authors, were online and expanded on several aspects of the study. They chose to use plateau points to avoid using assumed cutoffs. Most studies were close to the plateau point with excellent test characteristics at around 50 exams, although some were sooner, and some never stopped improving.
This is a game changing study and has several implications for education and training. We had several great questions from the audience and had an excellent discussion. Plus we got to see Matt Field's back yard and Jeremy Boyd's sun room.
We had a great AEUS-SonoRoundtable Journal Club covering point-of-care ultrasound for appendicitis. We covered 2 papers, Fox et al., Prospective evaluation of emergency physician performed bedside ultrasound to detect acute appendicitis., and Sivitz et al, Evaluation of acute appendicitis by pediatric emergency physician sonography.
The fellows from North Shore and the University of Utah reviewed 4 articles covering ultrasound for endotracheal tube placement, ultrasound for prediction of difficult airways, and ultrasound-guided surgical airways.
Save the following dates for our upcoming live meetings. Times TBD.
We had a great meeting wrapping up the recent ACEP 2014 Scientific Assembly in Chicago. The panel included Chris Raio, Resa Lewiss, Alfredo Tirado, Tobias Kummer, Srikar Adhikari, and others from the ACEP US Section. We discussed everything ultrasound related that happened at the meeting, including the US management course, the Industry Roundtable and US Section meetings, the best research from the Research Forum, and all the latest ultrasound equipment from the show floor.