Division of Emergency Ultrasound

Emergency Ultrasound (EUS) is an integral part of patient care and residency training in the Medical University of South Carolina’s Department of Emergency Medicine. All Division Faculty are Fellowship-trained in Emergency Ultrasound. The core features of the EUS program include a high-quality educational program, an Emergency Ultrasound fellowship, and continuous quality management.

Education

In our Department, there are 32 EM Attendings with general EUS privileges. These ultrasound-savvy attending physicians are also eager to train the next generation of EM providers. Every EM resident at MUSC receives extensive training in all facets of EUS, beginning with a month-long rotation that focuses on the core applications laid out in the 2016 ACEP Emergency Ultrasound Guidelines (Trauma, Intrauterine Pregnancy, AAA, Cardiac, Biliary, Urinary Tract, DVT, Soft-tissue/musculoskeletal, Thoracic, Ocular, and Procedural Guidance). A minimum of 150 scans are completed during this rotation.

You may learn more about the rotation by going to the MUSC EUS Rotation Page.

Our residents have the option to enroll in our Ultrasound Academy, which grants them additional certification upon graduating residency. This program is headed by the EUS faculty, and will allow them to become extremely adept at using the ultrasound in the ED. We offer an advanced ultrasound elective, and residents complete a ultrasound scholarly project. We also participate in the SAEM Sonogames, SAEM Website.

A fourth year medical student elective (EMED 854: Emergency Ultrasound) is also offered.

In addition to the formal rotations, lectures dedicated to EUS occur throughout the academic year. Weekly EUS conference is conducted to review recent EUS studies, discuss relevant EUS literature, and provide expanded education in point-of-care ultrasound. These conferences, which occur on Wednesdays from 9:00 am to 12:00 pm, are open to all EM providers.

Our Emergency Department currently has three Sonosite X-Porte machines and two Zonare machines. Each machine has a full complement of probes and wireless uploads to a Q-path workflow solution.

We maintain an extensive education website which is free and open access. On the site, you will find a large quantity of high-quality content including narrated lectures, image/video galleries, cases, administrative tools, EUS articles, and much more.

You may access the site at Emergency Ultrasound Teaching.

Continuous Quality Management

A robust QA/QI system has been created to ensure competency and high quality scanning in the ED. We use Qpath to review and provide feedback on all scans submitted for QA by faculty and residents. The Ultrasound Division of the MUSC Department of Emergency Medicine recently became one of the first 3 Emergency Ultrasound programs in the entire nation to receive accreditation approval through ACEP’s “Clinical Ultrasound Accreditation Program (CUAP)”.