Chest ultrasound in practice: A review of utility in the clinical setting

摘要

I wish to congratulate Drs Hew and Heintze for their article and to make one or two corrections, as well as draw the readers' attention to the international evidence-based recommendations for point-of-care lung ultrasound (US) published earlier this year in Intensive Care Medicine.Technique. Most authors (including this writer) recommend that the operator switch off the tissue harmonic imaging (THE) and compounding (known as 'multibeam' on some machines). These two 'filter out' artefacts and can render lung pathology such as B-lines much less obvious (Figs 1,2).Pneumothorax. The authors correctly point out that absence of lung sliding is insufficient to rule out pneumothorax using US. In fact, there are four US signs required to accurately diagnose PTX: (i) presence of lung point(s); (ii) absence of lung sliding; (iii) absence of B-lines and (iv) absence of lung pulse.