Preface

Ultrasonography has clearly been demonstrated to improve the quality of patient care and enhance patient safety. Its applications transcend any one medical specialty or hospital location. Medical centers, both large and small, have incorporated ultrasound into their clinical pathways. Medical schools now integrate ultrasound into educational curriculums in a multidisciplinary manner. Ultrasound is used by medical providers working in prehospital and austere environments and on the front lines of combat zones. Clinician investigators from nearly all medical specialties and from across the globe have published research on the applications of point-of-care ultrasound.

This textbook was written by and for clinicians who are actively engaged in patient care. We selected topics that represent clinical problems most commonly encountered in the emergency or acute care setting. Our aim was to address the needs of clinicians with varied backgrounds and training. Emergency physicians certainly will find this book applicable to their daily practice. Physicians who practice in family medicine, internal medicine, hospital medicine, critical care, pediatrics, and general surgery will utilize many of these ultrasound examinations to optimize their patient care. We trust that midlevel providers who practice in related fields will also find this textbook useful.

This edition features new topics or chapters on transesophageal echocardiography, resuscitation of the critically ill, regional anesthesia, coding and billing, science of image generation, and musculoskeletal applications. These additions highlight the degree in which point-of-care ultrasound has permeated normal clinical activities. More color figures are embedded throughout the book. Finally, we feel that if a picture is worth a thousand words, then a video may be worth several hundred thousand. Videos are integrated with figures and can be quickly accessed via a QR code using a smartphone; they include expert commentary, multiple camera angles, and numerous normal and abnormal examinations.

We added three emergency ultrasound leaders as co-editors to this edition. Dr. Don Byars serves as the Emergency Medicine Ultrasound Fellowship Director and Medical Director of the Ultrasound Education Program at Eastern Virginia Medical School. Dr. Barry Knapp serves as Assistant Dean of Ultrasound Education and Program Director and Distinguished Professor of Emergency Medicine at Eastern Virginia Medical School. Dr. Andrew Laudenbach serves as co-Director of the Emergency Medicine Ultrasound fellowship at Hennepin Healthcare and is an Assistant Professor of Emergency Medicine at the University of Minnesota.

This will mark Dr. Jim Mateer's final edition as an editor for Emergency Ultrasound. As a junior attending emergency physician in the 1980s, Dr. Mateer had the foresight to view point-of-care ultrasound as an instrument to promote patient care and patient safety in the emergency department. He advanced his ultrasound skills independently through workshops and, in 1991, undertook ultrasound fellowship training in Cologne, Germany. Dr. Mateer developed and directed the first US Emergency Medicine Ultrasound Fellowship at the Medical College of Wisconsin in 1993. He published many of the early seminal papers on point-of-care ultrasound, including the "Model Curriculum for Emergency Medicine Ultrasound Training" in 1994. The emergency medicine community thanks Dr. Mateer, who is widely regarded as one of the fathers of Emergency Ultrasound, for his landmark contributions in promoting education in this field.