Sinai Ultrasound’s own Rob Arntfield served as ultrasound faculty at the recent Society of Critical Care Medicine’s Summer Conference entitled “Acute Cardiac Care.” The conference was held in Banff, Alberta, Canada at the majestic Banff Springs hotel. Superb lectures on acute cardiac care were complemented by practical workshops on point of care echocardiography and ECMO. The echocardiography training consisted of didactic lectures by Dr. Yanick Beaulieu and practical workshops.  These practical workshops featured live models as well as transthoracic and transesophageal simulators capable of mimicking normal and pathologic cardiac states.

The role of TEE in EM is still emerging.  Challenged by cost of the transducers and lack of training today, these obstacles are expected be overcome with time.  With effectively guaranteed excellent image acquisition and a low complication rate, TEE carries many advantages over TTE.  By allowing the TEE tranducer to either rest in the mid-esophageal 4-chamber view or trans-gastric short axis views during cardiac arrest, the need for prolonged pulse checks and/or TTE image acquisition for assessment of cardiac activity would be eliminated.  As TEE training (largely through effective simulation) penetrates the ED, future generations may wonder how we ever “coped” with the transthoracic approach in our arrested or peri-arrested patients.

Rob Arntfield demonstrates the use of the Vimedix TEE simulator at the SCCM Acute Cardiac Care Conference in Banff, Canada.