Paediatric ultrasound and point-of-care ultrasound

Your progress

Saved on this device.

Target exams

Red flags

• A normal or negative FAST scan does not exclude intra-abdominal injury in a child — paediatric solid-organ injury often bleeds into the parenchyma without free fluid, so an unstable child with a negative FAST still needs immediate surgical or retrieval management and a stable child still needs observation or CT
• Absence of lung sliding is not diagnostic of pneumothorax on its own — apnoea, mainstem intubation, pleurodesis, pneumonia and the supine neonate can all abolish sliding; only the lung point is highly specific, and a tension pneumothorax remains a clinical diagnosis
• Three or more B-lines in a single intercostal space are abnormal in a child and point to a wet lung (pulmonary oedema, interstitial pneumonia, bronchiolitis) — but B-lines are non-specific and must be read with the clinical picture
• Do not delay a time-critical intervention (decompression of a tension pneumothorax, transfusion in shock, surgical management of a ruptured viscus) to perform a 'quick scan' — POCUS answers a focused binary question and is adjunctive, never a substitute for the primary survey
• A sonographic pyloric muscle thickness of 3 to 4 millimetres sits at the boundary of hypertrophic pyloric stenosis in a small infant — measure in the correct longitudinal mid-plane with a relaxed stomach and reinterpret against the infant's age and size, because published criteria are under active revision
• Ultrasound guidance improves first-attempt success for difficult vascular access but does not replace sterile technique, catheter securement and confirmation of venous placement — an intraluminal catheter can still dislodge or extravasate
• POCUS is operator-dependent and confidence does not equal accuracy — a scan performed by an untrained operator can both over-call (artefact read as pathology) and under-call (true pathology missed) disease, so credentialing and image review matter

Life stages

Care settings

Clinical exam formats

Board mappings

• General and Community Paediatrics
• Recognition and management of the acutely ill or injured child — bedside imaging
• Procedural and diagnostic skills — point-of-care ultrasound
• Current 2026 PREP curriculum — bedside ultrasound in the acutely ill or injured child
• Critical care and retrieval medicine
• Clinical Applications
• Medical Sciences — ultrasound physics and artefact interpretation
• Diagnostic skills
• Short Cases
• Structured oral — acutely ill or injured child and bedside ultrasound
• 1.4 Safely and appropriately performs practical procedures and uses medical devices
• 2.7 Uses diagnostic imaging appropriately and radiation-aware
• 8. Patient safety
• Foundation of Practice (FOP)
• Applied Knowledge in Practice (AKP)
• Clinical — structured oral and procedural safety in an emergency
• General Pediatrics Content Outline — Emergency Medicine, Critical Care; Diagnostic imaging
• Universal Task 4: Management and Treatment
• Patient Care 1: procedural and diagnostic competency
• Systems-Based Practice
• Medical Expert
• Scholar — point-of-care ultrasound competency
• Pediatrics: Diagnostic and procedural bedside ultrasound