Benefits of Ultrasound

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Anchor lead: Using ultrasound helps clinicians track status of COVID-19 infection in real time, Elizabeth Tracey reports

Ultrasound is able to detect lung and heart changes related to COVID-19 infection quickly and reliably, Johns Hopkins critical medicine expert Brian Garibaldi says. He points out additional advantages to the technique.

Garibaldi: You can do it multiple times. You can record your images, you can show those to other people so you can get advice in real time, hey, I just did this ultrasound of so and so’s chest can you take a look at it and let me know if I’ve missed something. You can also do serial exams so it would be really hard to get an echo every day on a patient but if someone’s having problems and you’re worried about their heart, or you’re worried about fluid collections around their lung or their heart, you can do a real time assessment every day, in minutes, to be able to follow the trajectory of that patient longitudinally.  :27

Garibaldi says images previously obtained with CT scans can now be gotten at the bedside, avoiding both transporting critically ill patients and the need to decontaminate the CT scanner, which brings the machine offline for quite some time. At Johns Hopkins, I’m Elizabeth Tracey.