Clinician’s Corner: An introduction to point-of-care ultrasound

Abstract

A 67-year-old is brought to your resuscitation room in your emergency department. She is in acute distress and has a blood pressure of 211/120, a heart rate of 130 per minute, a respiratory rate of 31 breaths per minute, and an oxygen saturation of 88% on room air. You are about to call for a portable chest radiograph, but the emergency nurse practitioner reaches for the point-of-care ultrasound machine, puts the probe on the patient’s chest, and in under a minute, states: “I see B-lines and weak cardiac contractility; there is normal lung sliding.”