In this conversation, we will examine whether point-of-care ultrasound is a reliable predictor of outcome during Traumatic Cardiac Arrest (TCA). We will dig into the recently published systematic review on the topic with Tim Harris, who is one of the authors of the paper. We will examine why the authors decided to look at TCA and POCUS, the number of studies and patients examined, the type of Mechanism Of Injury (MOI) leading to TCA, what the results showed, and how this is relevant to practice. We also look at the other adjunctive markers in the pre-hospital domain to inform the Termination Of Resuscitation (TOR) based on the results found in this paper. We will also dig into another recently published paper related to the diagnostic performance of POCUS in resuscitative outcomes published in April of this year on a systematic review and meta-analysis of 3265 patients and outcomes with POCUS.

To do this I have Tim Harris with me. Tim is a Professor of Emergency Medicine and Programme Director for the Emergency and Resuscitation Medicine programme at the Blizard Institute, Queen Mary University of London. He has trained extensively overseas, training in Emergency Medicine and Intensive Care Medicine in the UK, Australia, Africa, India and Samoa. The papers we examine include:

Is point-of-care ultrasound a reliable predictor of outcome during traumatic cardiac arrest? A systematic review and meta-analysis from the SHoC investigators:https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0300957221003270

Diagnostic performance of point-of-use ultrasound of resuscitation outcomes: A systematic review and meta-analysis of 3265 patients:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10129265/

My thanks to Tim for an engaging and insightful interview.

POCUS as a predictor of Traumatic Cardiac Arrest outcome with Tim Harris