Lung Ultrasound for Anesthesia, Intensive Care and Emergency Medicine

Lung ultrasound is an underrated tool in preclinical emergency situations, intensive care units, ORs and emergency rooms. For certain clinical questions, there is a drastically higher sensitivity in comparison to chest X-ray examinations (sensitivity in pneumothorax diagnostics 86 vs. 28%, specificity 97 vs. 100%. A standardized examination improves the quality of the ultrasound examination and thus the diagnostic value. The article provides basic information on pulmonary ultrasound and aims to highlight the superiority of ultrasound over X-ray procedures for anesthesia, intensive care and emergency medicine in accordance to the international evidence-based recommendations for point of care ultrasound. Finally, we added a checklist for the post-interventional exclusion of pneumothorax and a checklist for the diagnosis of dyspnea by sonography. © 2018 Georg Thieme Verlag KG Stuttgart New York.