ULTRASOUND at a DISTANCE: Tele-Mentored US Supported Medical Interactions Project

“We were MacGyvering off-the-shelf technology, cobbling this idea together on evenings and weekends, working around our schedules as clinicians,” says trauma surgeon Andrew Kirkpatrick, principal investigator on the Tele-Mentored Ultrasound Supported Medical Interactions (TMUSMI) project and Cumming School of Medicine professor. “This NEST funding is so exciting because it allows us to formalize our work and will accelerate our program a thousand-fold.”

The goal of Kirkpatrick’s group, which is co-led by former NASA flight surgeon Douglas Hamilton, is to develop protocols allowing an inexperienced clinician to be mentored at a distance through any unfamiliar medical assessment including, if necessary, ultrasound imaging.

The premise is that ultrasound technology is extremely useful, it’s getting cheaper and more available. But it requires experience to use, especially to avoid misinterpretation. And while available communications, like Skype, can work to facilitate distance diagnoses and assessments, the issue remains that — in trauma care particularly — time is critical. A delay of even five seconds is too much. So the challenge is to create smart, simplified ultrasound that provides instantaneous two-way communication.

“We picture ultrasound being as available one day as the defibrillators at the rink or the mall,” Kirkpatrick says. The team began this work 15 years ago; they are the most published people in the world in the field with a combined 50 years of experience designing and studying tele-medical instrumentation.

Their goals are likewise lofty: “We want to deliver rural, remote medical communities — and even space expeditions — with the speed, accuracy and convenience of urban-based point-of-care ultrasound and other lifesaving medical procedures.”

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