April 14, 2020
INSIDE STORY
Together with Italy, Spain has borne the brunt of the coronavirus pandemic in Europe. By late March and early April, roughly 300 people infected with the virus were arriving daily at the 1,000-bed Madrid hospital where Tomás Villén sees patients. “We have moved from being a normal hospital to kind of a war hospital,” Villén said. That means new ways of working. Doctors would typically assess the extent of pneumonia in the lungs, for instance, with a computed tomography scan — but Villén and his colleagues can’t take the risk of transporting critically ill patients to and from the radiology department, where the CT scanner resides. Plus, it can take an hour to fully disinfect those machines between uses. A more agile solution was needed. That’s where ultrasound comes in.
The long view: Doctors battling the pandemic worldwide are discovering the versatility of ultrasound — and they’re sharing their findings with each other. Point-of-care machines like GE Healthcare’s Venue and Venue Go are relatively easy for clinicians to bring to a patient’s bedside, and they’re easier to wipe down with disinfectant afterwards than traditional CT scanners. Necessity is the mother of invention or, if you prefer, adaptation: Cindy Owen, director of Clinical Insights and Development at GE Healthcare, said that after the pandemic recedes, “ultrasound will continue to be used in [emergency department and ICU] settings, and probably more so, because a broader understanding of its usefulness is occurring.”
Learn more here about how an imaging technology usually associated with pregnancy is helping doctors fight COVID-19.
WAYS THE WORLD ? FOUGHT BACK
1. An App For That Researchers in Switzerland are developing a smartphone app that can listen to your cough and tell you whether it could indicate COVID-19.
2. Quick Cleanup A startup associated with Trinity College Dublin created a robot that uses ultraviolet light to quickly disinfect hospital rooms.
3. Contact Solution A team led by researchers at MIT is exploring how to use smartphones to do “contact tracing,” with the goal of helping public health officials contain the spread of the coronavirus while maintaining users’ privacy.
Click here for more promising developments in global health.
— VIDEO OF THE WEEK —
The ventilator guru: 100 GE Healthcare volunteers set aside their normal lives and turn up at our Wisconsin factory to help build medical equipment in critical demand for COVID-19 patients.
— QUOTE OF THE DAY —
“What’s really amazing is how the medical community has come together globally to share information on a human scale. One country helping another to teach what they’ve learned.”
— Cindy Owen, director of Clinical Insights and Development at GE Healthcare
Quote: GE Reports. Image: GE Healthcare.
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