Purpose of Review Ultraportable handheld ultrasound (HHU) devices are being rapidly adopted by emergency medicine (EM) physicians. Though knowledge of the breadth of their utility and functionality is still limited compared to cart-based systems, these machines are becoming more common due to ease-of-use, extreme affordability, and improving technology. Recent Findings Images obtained with HHU are comparable to those obtained with traditional machines but create unique issues regarding billing and data management. HHU devices are increasingly used successfully to augment the education of practitioners-in-training, by emergency physicians in austere environments, and in the burgeoning fields of “tele-ultrasound” and augmented reality scanning. Summary This review seeks to describe the current state of use of HHU devices in the emergency department (ED) including device overview, institutional concerns, unique areas of use, recent literature since their adoption into clinical EM, and their future potential.

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The mechanisms that determine organ identity along the digestive tract in humans are poorly understood. Here we describe the rare case of a young patient who presented with congenital gastric-type heteroplasia in the midjejunum. The lesions, located along the antimesenteric midline of the gut, were made of histologically and functionally normal gastric epithelium without inflammation or in situ/invasive carcinoma. They resembled the anatomy of the lesions developing in the mouse gut as a result of haploinsufficiency of the Cdx2 homeobox gene. The lesions were devoid of CDX2 but without mutation in the coding sequence or in a cis-regulatory element required for intestine-specific expression. Combining these data with the CDX2 expression pattern established from human embryos and cases of Meckel diverticula, we propose a scenario for this patient's presentation, in which CDX2 was missing at the site of ventral closure during gut morphogenesis, with subsequent default differentiation into gastric instead of intestinal tissue. Altogether, these observations argue in favor of a pivotal role played by CDX2 in determining intestinal identity during human embryonic development, as previously shown experimentally in mice.