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Look! Up in the sky! It’s ultralight, lifesaving ultrasound!

July 24, 2015
After nine months of attending emergency scenes with GE’s Vscan handheld ultrasound in the top pocket of his backpack, Dr Alan Garner of CareFlight says he’d feel very nervous leaving the base without it. Ultrasound has in recent years become part of critical care in hospital situations, but ever lighter and more portable units have also enabled its use as part of at-the-scene patient assessments. CareFlight—a charitably funded, aeromedical response and rescue service that reaches some 5,000 emergency patients in Australia and the region each year—recently started using the new dual-probe version of Vscan handheld ultrasound with transformative results.
“The question we have in this context, the one we really want an answer to right now,” says Garner describing a hypothetical roadside crash scene with one victim trapped in a car, “is are their lungs up, and do I need to make a hole in their chest? With the Vscan’s high-frequency linear probe you can instantly, within two seconds, go, ‘Well that lung’s normal. This lung’s normal. That’s not the cause of their low blood pressure or their hypoxia.’”

/><br /> <br /> <em>Dr Alan Garner, OAM, medical director of CareFlight, removes the Vscan dual-probe portable ultrasound from his backpack aboard the Kawasaki BK117 helicopter, which provides CareFlight’s Emergency Rapid Response Trauma Service from its Westmead base. Image courtesy CareFlight.</em><br /> <br /> “And this is small enough to stick in your pocket!” says Garner, holding Vscan in the palm of his hand. Weight matters, too, not only because CareFlight choppers and jets have to travel light—balancing the need for crew and fuel, with medical-equipment and patient load. It’s mostly because the response team carries critical equipment on their backs, from the aircraft to the patient. And in most urban situations, the CareFlight emergency physician continues critical care in an ambulance on the way to the hospital—so critical equipment has to be carried with them.<br /> <br /> In the urban emergency environment, CareFlight’s role is more about “delivering team to patient than about putting the patient in an aircraft”, says Garner. Starting effective treatment as soon as possible at the scene of the injury improves patient outcomes, so flying in as close to an accident scene as possible typically delivers help ahead of an ambulance battling traffic, but once assessed and stabilised, the patient is then usually within 15 minutes’ drive of hospital care. CareFlight’s specialised emergency physician offers continuous care, whatever the means of transport.<br /> <br /> One of CareFlight’s four Vscans is used in the Northern Territory, where the service’s helicopters and jets provide regional care and transport of patients much more quickly than would be possible by any other means, sometimes from oil or gas rigs such as the massive INPEX Ichthys LNG project 220km off the north coast of Australia, sometimes from holiday destinations or cruise ports in countries such as Vanuatu and Fiji. With Vscan in their top pocket, physicians can constantly, efficiently monitor patients’ conditions. “I couldn’t describe it as anything other than lifesaving, because of the ability to intervene immediately to fix the right problem,” says Garner.