Point-of-Care Ultrasound Scientific and Case Reports Session 1
Assessing the Feasibility and Operability of Handheld Point-of-Care Ultrasound to Visualize the Pancreas: A Pilot Study
Sunday, April 7, 2024
7:31am – 7:38am
Location: 410
Authors: Alice Lee, Stanford University Neha Antil, Stanford University Ahmed Kaffas, Stanford Walter Park, Stanford University
Transabdominal ultrasound (TAUS) is a non-invasive, inexpensive, and highly accessible bedside imaging modality that is established for early pancreatic cancer detection and screening in Asian and European countries. Beyond the conventional TAUS, handheld point-of-care ultrasound (hPOCUS) offers benefits including affordability, portability, physician operability, and the potential for real-time, decision-focused imaging assessment. There are no published reports describing hPOCUS use for the pancreas. Our pilot study aimed to demonstrate the feasibility of using hPOCUS to visualize the pancreas. Two physicians performed independent hPOCUS exams on 40 patients and the results were compared to EUS, MRI, and/or CT results from the past 12 months. Our results suggest that hPOCUS performed by an experienced operator can visualize the pancreas head and body in nearly all (95-100%) patients. Visualization of the pancreas tail is the most difficult, but this improves with fasting. Our experienced operator also successfully visualized pancreas lesions >1 cm in 75% of patients compared to EUS, MRI, and/or CT. Maneuvers to optimize ultrasound pancreas visualization and lesion detection such as liquid ingestion, patient repositioning, contrast-enhancement, and ultrasound tissue characterization have been previously described, and future research will focus on studying these optimization methods for hPOCUS pancreas exams.