Korbin Haycock, ER doc extraordinaire.

So a few months ago I got to talking with Korbin about POCUS, fluids and resuscitation, only to find out this guy is doing all sorts of awesome stuff in his ED in sunny California.  Got to meet him at H&R2018 and he had even more tricks up his sleeve he was telling me about. He will definitely be back for H&R2019 on the faculty side of things.

In the meantime, let’s review renovascular ultrasound with him:

And here is our discussion that took place at TheRounds Backstage during #HR2018.

Interesting stuff. It isn’t always so easy to get a nice renal view in ICU patients, but with some perseverance you often can. I’ve been toying with it and tying it in with the hepatic and portal flow patterns, but I have to admit I had sort of dismissed renal resistive index based on what I could find in the literature, that is until I got to chat with Korbin, who made me see there are some interesting avenues, especially the example he states on seeing it improve with vasopressin use in shock patients, which correlates with some of the data out there suggesting decreased need for RRT and better outputs with vasopressin on board.

I have a feeling there is relevance to this in acute care, and that the next couple of years will reveal some usefulness. The glitch had always been in not knowing what the baseline RRI is, and that it can be abnormal in chronic RF. There are, however, many patients who were perfectly well previously and where the assumption that their baseline is normal is probably safe.

Love to hear comments from anyone using this!

cheers

Philippe