Indigenously Developed Ultrasound Phantom Model

Point of care ultrasound (POCUS) is used ever more increasingly across the emergency medicine departments in India.

Guided procedures like nerve blocks, vascular access, abscess drainage and foreign body exploration are done more conveniently and efficiently utilising visualisation under ultra sonography.

Several training models are available commercially that aids in training the novice and expert in the field alike. The commercially available models are expensive and inaccessible for most, while the utility of POCUS in Emergency Department (ED) is on the rise. This has lead people to experiment with various models for training which ranges from basic gelatin moulds to ballistic gel. There are only a few studies that compare these with the commercially available products for educational purposes.

The home made models are cheaper and more easily procurable for training making it a relatively favourable choice in financially constrained situations. The investigators have been using a gelatine based training model to train their emergency medicine residents for many years. In this study they intend to assess whether their indigenously developed ultrasound phantom model is comparable to commercially available models for vascular access training.They also sought to assess the better preliminary teaching model for ultrasound guided vascular access: in-plane or out-of-plane approach?