Point of Care Ultrasound: An Essential Component of Patient Management in the Emergency Department

Point of care ultrasound is now an essential component of patient management in the emergency department or in the ICU. It can be useful to evaluate the etiology of shock and to predict fluid responsiveness. There are some specific caveats for doing those and they may also not apply for all critical ill patients. All these methods require, at least to some degree, an estimation of cardiac output using echocardiogram.