Patient Self-Performed Point-of-Care Ultrasound: Using Communication Technologies to Empower Patient Self-Care

Abstract

Point-of-Care ultrasound (POCUS) is an invaluable tool permitting the understanding of critical physiologic and anatomic details wherever and whenever a patient has a medical need. Thus the application of POCUS has dramatically expanded beyond hospitals to become a portable user-friendly technology in a variety of prehospital settings. Traditional thinking holds that a trained user is required to obtain images, greatly handicapping the scale of potential improvements in individual health assessments. However, as the interpretation of ultrasound images can be accomplished remotely by experts, the paradigm wherein experts guide novices to obtain meaningful images that facilitate remote care is being embraced worldwide. The ultimate extension of this concept is for experts to guide patients to image themselves, enabling secondary disease prevention, home-focused care, and self-empowerment of the individual to manage their own health. This paradigm of remotely telementored self-performed ultrasound (RTMSPUS) was first described for supporting health care on the International Space Station. The TeleMentored Ultrasound Supported Medical Interventions (TMUSMI) Research Group has been investigating the utility of this paradigm for terrestrial use. The technique has particular attractiveness in enabling surveillance of lung health during pandemic scenarios. However, the paradigm has tremendous potential to empower and support nearly any medical question poised in a conscious individual with internet connectivity able to follow the directions of a remote expert. Further studies and development are recommended in all areas of acute and chronic health care.

Experience and Enlightenment of Handheld Ultrasound Applications in Multiple Scenarios Based on 5G Technology

“…The TeleMentored Ultrasound Supported Medical Interventions proposes that adding a remote ultrasound capability to the typical smart home infrastructure may provide the ability to improve home care in almost limitless ways [26].…”

Pelvic floor muscle contraction automatic evaluation algorithm for pelvic floor muscle training biofeedback using self-performed ultrasound

“…Recent studies have demonstrated the feasibility of self-performed US [16][17][18]. For example, self-performed endovaginal telemonitoring was used for reproductive evaluations during infertility treatment [17], and a study during COVID-19 revealed the feasibility of self-performed lung US in adults at home by teaching remotely [18].…”

Lung Ultrasound: A Leading Diagnostic Tool

“…The study highlights how this tool can be successfully employed as an alternative to repeated X-ray examinations for peripheral lung disease monitoring. In [17], the authors show how current communication technologies can be exploited to allow patients to perform US assessments of their lung status.…”

“…In most papers reporting damage during lung ultrasound exams, hemorrhages were locally provoked on the lungs of small animals via static long expositions and often by locating the probe directly on the parietal pleura, i.e., by adopting working conditions that are never met in standard lung ultrasound exams. The submitted contributions have demonstrated the solid confidence of physicians to be using a safe [1,3,8,10,13,14] and harmless [8,10,13] imaging device that is free of adverse effects [5] and produces no side effects [12,17]. Computer-aided image analysis is a wide topic ranging from simple algorithms for the detection and counting of vertical artefacts in single-lung US images to convolutional neural networks for an explicit diagnosis of a pathology.…”