Assessment of hemodynamic status in a shock state remains a challenging issue in Emergency Medicine and Critical Care. As the use of invasive hemodynamic monitoring declines, bedside-focused ultrasound has become a valuable tool in the evaluation and management of patients in shock. No longer a means to simply evaluate organ anatomy, ultrasound has expanded to become a rapid and noninvasive method for the assessment of patient physiology. Clinicians caring for critical patients should strongly consider integrating ultrasound into their resuscitation pathways.

Infective endocarditis is a challenging diagnosis that is rarely made in the emergency department. As the use of focused emergency ultrasound expands into more applications, including advanced echocardiography, the diagnosis of infective endocarditis may be made earlier, potentially leading to more timely treatment. We report a case of an ill-appearing patient presenting to the emergency department with an indwelling central venous catheter, a cardiac murmur, and necrotic toes, who was diagnosed with a large tricuspid vegetation and prominent tricuspid regurgitation on bedside emergency ultrasound. A cardiologist-performed echocardiogram confirmed these findings during the patient's hospital admission.

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With a high degree of sensitivity for the detection of potential survivors after traumatic arrest, FAST represents an effective method of separating those that do not warrant the risk and resource burden of RT from those who may survive. The likelihood of survival if pericardial fluid and cardiac motion were both absent was zero.