Ultrasounds in Action

This weekend I picked up an extra shift shadowing in the Emergency Room at a hospital and got to see some visualization technology in action, which was pretty cool. I can’t reveal much because of HIPAA regulations, but within my 3-hour shadowing shift, the resident I was following used a portable ultrasound machine twice on two separate patients whose veins were difficult to locate to put an IV in/draw blood. Without the portable ultrasound, the veins would have been incredibly hard to find, and according to the resident, medical staff would just have to keep poking around blindly with the needle until they find the vein (this sounds very painful and seems like a low-yield procedure to me). So in this sense, the ultrasound machine acted as a very helpful tool to deliver the appropriate medicine and tests to help the patient. This reminded me back to when Dr. Walline from our field trip last week commented that visual technologies, such as the ultrasound, gives “hope” in terms of doctors being able to use this tool to help diagnose and save their patients.

However, I was pretty surprised that using the ultrasound machine to insert a needle was not as easy as it sounded. Even with the ultrasound machine, it took numerous tries to find the vein—which became a source of pain for the patient (since needles are being pushed in and wiggled around multiple times) and also a source of frustration for the doctor because he/she could not find the vein. This makes me wonder how, in the future, ultrasound or other visualization technologies will change or improve to make medical procedures such as these easier to do.