eFAST for Pneumothorax

This is a bit of a rant about a few things that I am interested in lately.

I was watching the FOAMed feed on Twitter the other day when I saw a paper mentioned by Dr Jonathan Henry ( @EmergencyEcho ).  Thanks for the post pub, peer review. Here was the tweet that caught my eye:

Here is the paper:

Detection of pneumothoraces in patients with multiple blunt trauma: use and limitations of eFAST published in the EMJ this week, lead author is Dr Sauter.  The study is a retrospective, cross-sectional analysis of trauma patients with pneumothorax who underwent both an eFAST exam and a CT.  It was done in a Bernese ED in Switzerland.

The highlight statistic here was “59%”, a really low sensitivity for eFAST detection of pneumothorax.  This caught my eye as it is one of the lowest sensitivities I have ever seen for the US detection of traumatic pneumothorax.  Now, we must note that this is a small, retrospective, single-centre data set.  There area  lot of potential problems with this sort of study.  However, I would like to dive a little deeper into the paper – there are some things we can learn from this data.  So onto the podcast to hear what I really think about these numbers.

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Let me know what you think below.

See you in Berlin, Brisbane or Broome soon

Casey

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