Page 141 - Ultrasonography in Prehospital and Emergency Medicine - Rein Ketelaars
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                 Prehospital chest ultrasound by a Dutch helicopter emergency medical service 139
analyzed using IBM SPSS Statistics for Windows, version 19.0 (IBM Corp., Armonk, NY, USA). Differences in duration of the examination between years were analyzed using one- way analysis of variance (ANOVA). Differences in quality of imaging for different body weights were analyzed using the chi-squared test. A p-value < .05 was considered statistically significant. The medical ethics review board of our institution determined our research to be exempt from review.
Results
Between January 1, 2007 and June 1, 2010, 2572 patients were treated by our HEMS. In 281 patients (11%), 326 portable US examinations of the chest were performed during 275 scram- bles. Sometimes more than one patient was treated during one scramble and some patients underwent more than one US examination.
There were 39 US examinations performed in 31 patients receiving primary cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR). There were 287 US examinations in 250 trauma patients. The number of examinations per patient was 1.26 for CPR and 1.15 for trauma patients (difference is not significant).
The mean age was 38 years (median 36), with a mode of 22. There was a relatively high inci- dence of US examinations before the age of 4 years. Seven children were younger than 1 year, age distribution
  40
35
30
25
20
15
10
5
0
                     patient age
Figure 6.1 Age distrubution of all patients who underwent a chest ultrasound examination
 6
 number of patients
















































































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