Thursday, August 1, 2019

The Butterfly Ultrasound in Global Health



The black appearing object on the far left is a vein which is not compressible and therefore indicates there is presence of a clot. 

The most fun I had on this trip was being able to introduce the Butterfly Ultrasound to the trainees. For those of you who have been following along on my Global Health journey you may have picked up on the recent excitement over a handheld ultrasound probe that plugs in to your phone. This tech is so incredible for so many reasons--it has an incredible price point of $2000 USD versus the larger machines which can be up to $20-40K!! The image quality is great and the portability makes it easy to take to the most rural of places! I have now used this device in Rural Bangladesh at the Rohingya Refugee camps, in Nepal, in Ethiopia and will go on to use this in a project with Bridge to Health in Kenya and Uganda! In the image above we diagnosed a blood clot in the leg of a patient with cervical cancer. In the images below there was a patient who was found to have a lung abscess and I wanted to show the trainees what this may look like on ultrasound. ( All photos taken with permission ) We spent the rest of the day asking several patients if they would allow us to perform simple ultrasound to identify normal and abnormal pathology. While the training session itself was limited to the week that I was present we really focused on some basic concepts and luckily the physician who is mainly in charge of the Medical ICU at Ayder is well trained in ultrasound and so with a local expert there is even more of an incentive for trainees to practice and continue to identify important pathology that may aide in early intervention and better patient outcomes. 
examining a patient's lung with the butterfly ultrasound
a lung abscess on lung ultrasound-what you cannot see is the presence of an outer capsule of this fluid filled structure and lung tissue surrounding it


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