Diagnostics Grand Rounds
Diagnostics Grand Rounds brings clinicians with unmet needs to the Wyss Institute. The goal of these sessions is to inform technology developers about important clinical problems that can help them direct their technology development efforts. Presenters are asked to identify diagnostic needs that will have an impact on the quality of care they deliver.
The last several decades have experienced an extraordinary evolution in the development of ultrasound technology used in healthcare, especially in the cardiology and anesthesiology medical subspecialties. Echocardiography has become the standard of care in the perioperative management of patients as a diagnostic tool of cardiovascular disease and to guide surgical decision making, as a monitor of perioperative cardiac performance in high-risk patients, and as an imaging modality in interventional procedures to guide the placement of devices in the cardiac catheterization laboratory. Furthermore, perioperative ultrasound has become a mainstay non-invasive technology for imaging pathology in the chest and abdomen and facilitates regional anesthetics techniques.
Most of the historical progression in technological development and clinical applications of ultrasound equipment has focused on more complex and expensive hardware and software with larger and more cumbersome footprints, which have become increasingly more limited to medical subspecialty utilization. More recently, disruptive innovation has favorably re-directed this focus on more user-friendly, less complex, and expensive equipment that targets mainstream healthcare professionals and significantly larger populations in both acute care and ambulatory medicine. In this lecture, Stanton K. Shernan, MD,FAHA,FASE will focus on current and future directions in ultrasound technology and its clinical applications in the rapidly evolving field of medical diagnostic imaging.