Incorporating point-of-care ultrasound into daily intensive care unit rounds: Another source of interruptions?

Point-of-care ultrasound (POCUS) is the use of bedside ultrasonography by the treating clinician, incorporating those images into direct clinical decisions. While there are a number of different techniques and training pathways in this relatively new modality, there has been little discussion around the logistics of integrating POCUS into the standard critical care "business day" of ward rounds, procedures and meetings. This article explores some of these aspects and presents data from an online survey of POCUS practitioners.

Sudden cardiac arrest in hypertrophic cardiomyopathy with dynamic cavity obstruction: The case for a decatecholaminisation strategy.

Catecholamines are entrenched in the management of shock states. A paradigm shift has pervaded the critical care arena in recent years acknowledging their propensity to cause harm and fuel a 'death-spiral'. We present the case of a 21-year-old male following a witnessed out-of-hospital cardiac arrest who received high-quality cardiopulmonary resuscitation and standard advanced life support for refractory ventricular fibrillation until return of spontaneous circulation after 70 min.

Model-driven gas exchange monitoring in the critically ill.

Understanding pulmonary gas exchange performance is a dynamic process which, depending on clinical context, exhibits different levels of complexity. Global tools such as tension-based indexes yield clinically crucial information under very specific conditions. Yet, accurate mechanistic insight can only originate in model-based tools.