Although lung ultrasound has been used for quite some time, especially in the emergency setting (almost every clinician has already seen a pleural effusion in ultrasound, and ultrasound has also been used in diagnosing a pneumothorax), we hardly ever used it for diagnosing diseases of the lung itself. COVID-19 changed this approach: with highly contagious patients lying intubated on the ICU, CT often was not an option - bedside ultrasound is way more safe, portable, and just as reliable in the right hands.
We start this course with the anatomical and physiologic backgrounds of the chest and lungs, and compare chest radiographs, CT images and ultrasound loops. Although we mostly look at artifacts, you will be amazed at how many diseases you can find and how easily you can follow up your patients with just an ultrasound probe.
There are several lung pathologies we discuss in this MasterClass - we already mentioned pneumothorax and pleural effusion, but did you know you can see pneumonia and pulmonary edema in ultrasound? Diffuse parenchymal lung diseases play an important role as well, and you will also learn about consolidations. A whole chapter deals with the co-dependence between the heart and the lungs, both in otherwise healthy patients and in the special context of COVID-19.
The last chapter is something a little different: here you will learn about invasive procedures, such as thoracentesis and thoracic biopsies, from two pulmonologists who have performed hundreds if not thousands of them in their patients. They discuss how to see and guide your needle with ultrasound, how that impacts patient safety and procedural success, and how you can train this on a self-built phantom at home.
After graduating from this Lung ultrasound MasterClass, you will have no problem when you can't move your patient to radiology and bedside chest radiography is not available because you know - the answer to your questions is just a transducer away.
