In November of 2018, I once again had the opportunity to travel to Tanzania with the Colorectal Surgical Team from Cincinnati Children’s. My role was to perform ultrasound, x-ray, and contrast radiology procedures on patients who have abnormalities of the large intestine and rectum before their special surgery needed to fix the abnormalities. This year I was fortunate enough to have one of the ultrasound manufacturers lend me one of their new ultrasound tools that allowed me to connect the ultrasound transducer directly to a small tablet instead of a large laptop or large US machine.
Those machines are very difficult to bring up to the patient floor or the emergency department in some of the remote hospitals we travel to in Africa. The ultrasound probe is the same one that is placed on the skin here in our department, but instead of the large machine used here to view the inside of the body, the probe is attached to this small computer tablet for viewing. The images are spectacular, very similar to our large machines in Cincinnati Children’s. The real advantage is that I can bring this tablet to the patient in Tanzania, anywhere inside or outside the hospital, without electricity since the probe and tablet run on battery power. These images can be used to help manage the patient for the best possible outcome at the time of the surgery.
Contributed by Dr. Steven Kraus and edited by Janet Adams, RDMS, RVT, CNMT, RT(N).
