Medical Professionals

Podcast #95 - Lung Ultrasound for Pneumothorax with Fritz Fuller

5/15/2018

Fritz Fuller has been gone for a while but joins us for a discussion of lung ultrasound with its application specifically for pneumothorax. This is probably something you have learned or at least heard of before, but rarely does an introductory course get into the details we are going to discuss in this post.

First, a quick fun fact: the first reported use of ultrasound in pneumothorax was with a horse in 1986!

When talking about what probe to use, there are quite a few options. Linear, curvilinear, phased array, or micro convex are all options. However, some will recommend the last one as the preferred option even though it is probably the least common probe. Preferably, use a "lung" setting but if not available can use "soft tissue" or "small parts" exams.

Jerry Hoffman pattern recognition, hypothesis testing- so depends on what I’m looking for Accuracy of POCUS vs CXR (1,2) US way more sensitive ~90% vs ~50% for CXR, but specificity was roughly the same ~99%.

LUS for PTX is based on four basic signs (Volpecelli et al 2012): 1. Absence of lung sliding, 2. Absence of B-lines, 3. lung point, 4. Absence of lung pulse

There are a lot more points (along with citations) and we discuss them both in the podcast and in the PDF below. Check out the "Podcast #95 Show Notes" below for the details. Also, Fritz made a video detailing how to peform Power Doppler on a M-Turbo. Check that out, as well.

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