The Evolution of Cardiovascular Ultrasound: A Review of Cardiac Point-of-Care Ultrasound (POCUS) Across Specialties

The use of cardiac point-of-care ultrasound (POCUS) is now widespread in clinics, emergency departments, and all areas of the hospital. Users include medical trainees, advanced practice practitioners, and attending physicians in many specialties and sub-specialties. Opportunities to learn cardiac POCUS and requirements for training vary across specialties as does the scope of the cardiac POCUS examination. In this review, we describe both a brief history of how cardiac POCUS emerged from echocardiography and the state of the art across a variety of medical fields.

Patient-centered home cancer screening attitudes during SARS-CoV-2 pandemic

COVID-19 has caused disruptions in health care, in particular cancer screenings. The primary aim of our work was to evaluate the degree to which populations were accepting of home-based screenings for colorectal cancer (CRC) and cervical cancer (primary HPV testing). Three groups of adults having distinct health burdens which may affect acceptance of home-based cancer screening were identified through outpatient electronic medical records as follows as either having survived a COVID hospitalization, having been positive for non-COVID respiratory illness or having type 2 diabetes. 132 respondents (58% female) completed an online survey with hypothetical cases about their acceptance of home-based CRC or cervical cancer screening. Among females, urine and vaginal screening for primary HPV testing was acceptable to 64% and 59%, respectively. Among both males and females, CRC home screening with fecal immunochemical test (FIT) or Cologuard was acceptable to 60% of the respondents. When adjusting for education, women with a positive attitude toward home-based urine /vaginal screening were 49 times and 23 times more likely to have a positive attitude toward CRC screening (aOR=48.7 (95% CI: 7.1, 337) and aOR=23.2 (95% CI: 3.8, 142), respectively). This report indicates that home-based cancer screens for CRC and primary HPV testing are acceptable to men and women and may allow for greater compliance with screening in the future.