This curriculum has been designed to provide a deeper understanding of clinical echocardiography and bedside ultrasound.  Throughout this year, you will be exposed to American Society of Echocardiography Guidelines, numerous primary sources and 9 hours of dedicated hands-on time in small groups and several image review sessions.  The goal of this course is to make you facile with ultrasound and prepare for clinical application at the bedside. 

Unfortunately, there is no way garner an indepth understanding of clinical ultrasound without dedicated time spent with the reading material and online resources.  There is no lecture time or power points in this curriculum; all material is made available to you prior to in person sessions and will need to be reviewed in entirety prior to the hands-on sessions.   The hands on sessions are intended to build upon one another and each week will have several more complex objectives.  The hands on objectives have been designed to be as granular as possible in an attempt to reflect the reading assignments and prepare for clinical application.  The hands on sessions are also designed to help you become adept with the technology of the machine and assist with image optimization and acquisition. And yes, there will be a test.

To address a major limitation of this curriculum: our hands-on time will only be spent with standardized patients without pathology. We will not be scanning patients during this year.  I do encourage individuals to do so while on service and in the clinic.  These images can be saved and brought to our image review sessions for group review.  Ideally, you all would have several hundred saved images with feedback on each ultrasound performed but alas that will not be the case this year and will be a goal for future iterations.  

With limited time, several very important topics have been left out of this curriculum.  Diastology, wall motion abnormalities, valvular disorders, intraventricular gradients, transesophageal echo and ultrasound in cardiac arrest, just to name a few.  Without a doubt, you will be able to apply the principles learned in this curriculum to any ultrasound topic that interests you. Please bring questions, ideas and comments to our hands-on sessions and we can make the curriculum better for future years. 

Thank you,

Terren Trott