International evidence-based guidelines on Point of Care Ultrasound (POCUS) for critically ill neonates and children issued by the POCUS Working Group of the European Society of Paediatric and Neonatal Intensive Care (ESPNIC)

The incorporation of Point of Care Ultrasound (POCUS) has represented a transformative change in clinical practice, challenging the traditional diagnostic and procedural “art” of medicine, especially in acute care environments. It has emerged as “the new” clinical tool and it has displaced, in some way, the classical stethoscope. It is performed and interpreted by the bedside clinician with the intent of either answering a focused question or achieving a specific procedural goal.

The use of POCUS by critical care providers has increased significantly in recent years and adult emergency medicine had pioneered this field with the publication of guidelines for implementation of structured POCUS training [1‐7]. These efforts were translated into paediatrics through emergency medicine. Since then, POCUS has gained popularity and expanded across many paediatric disciplines. However, unified guidelines on the use of POCUS and training do not exist yet for the paediatric and neonatal critical care.

Bedside goal-directed echocardiography has been the first POCUS application in paediatric practice with guidelines for implementation. An expert statement was published in 2011, followed by the United Kingdom Expert Consensus Statement on Neonatologist Performed Echocardiography (NPE) and recommendations for NPE in Europe [8‐10]. The Australian Clinician Performed Ultrasound (CPU) programme is a well-established academic curriculum developed to train neonatologists in the use of POCUS, though applications are limited to the evaluation of the neonatal brain and heart [10, 11] and the training programme is restricted to neonatal physiology. Non-cardiac POCUS may carry more opportunities for use as well as a number of benefits for both patients and providers. However, the lack of guidelines is a barrier to widespread adoption.

As more acute care providers invest in POCUS technology, it is critically important to define POCUS main purposes, establish formal training and develop accreditation guidelines, in order to maximise POCUS benefits and reducing risks.

Therefore, the European Society for Paediatric and Neonatal Intensive Care (ESPNIC) assembled a group of international paediatric POCUS key opinion leaders to create evidence-based guidelines for the use of current and emerging POCUS applications in the neonatal (NICU) and paediatric intensive care units (PICU) by any clinician working in these units.

Three lead authors, one neonatologist (YS), one paediatric intensivist (DDL) and one paediatric cardiologist (CT), identified expert colleagues who significantly contributed with publications in the POCUS field and/or have developed POCUS training courses in the last 10 years, similarly to what had been done with previous ESPNIC guidelines [12]. Panellists selection was performed prior to the literature search and for logistic reasons, the number of participants was limited to a maximum of 20. These colleagues should have been fairly representative of all POCUS fields and both Europe and North America and include also non-ESPNIC members. Moreover, at least one co-author should have been an expert in guidelines development and supervised the whole methodology, while literature search was performed by each panellist for their sub-section. All invited experts agreed to participate. Details of the methods used to produce these guidelines are given in the additional file for online supplementary material (see Additional file 1). These guidelines followed relevant ESPNIC internal procedures for manuscript endorsement, and this included an external review by ESPNIC officers not included among the panellists. Guidelines have been prepared according to the international Appraisal of Guidelines, Research and Evaluation (AGREE) [13]. Each recommendation is intended to be applied both for paediatric and neonatal patients, unless otherwise specified.

A total of 41 recommendations on the use of POCUS in neonatal and paediatric critical care were discussed. There was strong agreement on 22 recommendations after first-round voting. Following the discussion in an in-person meeting among the experts (organised within the 2018 ESPNIC congress (Paris, France)), 19 recommendations were re-worded and re-voted in the second round (Fig. 1). There was agreement on 17 recommendations and disagreement on 2 recommendations as summarised in Table 1 and discussed below.

Semi-quantitative systolic ventricular function measures that may be used in POCUS have been summarised in Table 2 [32‐45].

There remains a significant variation in clinical practice—in indications, training program and clinical governance. The application of POCUS in clinical practice is dependent on many factors including availability of ultrasound machines, providers, hospital setting, local patient population and specialty. Even within a unit, practice varies among clinicians and their expertise. We subdivided POCUS recommendations according to the estimated level of training required for their use (Fig. 2), and this may be helpful for their implementation.

Defining a scope of practice is fundamental for POCUS, and these ESPNIC guidelines have been developed for the targeted use of ultrasound in NICU and PICU by any neonatologist or paediatric intensivist. For most diagnostic (heart, lungs, brain and abdomen) and procedural (line placement and fluid drainage) POCUS applications, these guidelines can be used at all ages in children or neonates. However, while using cardiac POCUS in neonates, clinicians should be aware that undiagnosed critical congenital heart defects can present just during this period. They should acknowledge the limitations of skills, and it should not be used as a screening tool for diagnosing or excluding congenital heart defects. A patient with a suspected critical congenital heart defect should be quickly referred to a paediatric cardiologist, even if this implies out-of-hospital patient’s transportation. However, in cases of suspicion of a non-critical defect or for patients with low pre-test probability a more expectative management can be provided. Moreover, the use of pulse-oximetry screening for congenital heart defects is useful and should be integrated into the clinical decision-making process, as internationally recommended [168, 169].

These guidelines may help in standardising clinical practice across acute care settings and physicians. It is not meant to be prescriptive, but rather to outline the important features of structured POCUS applications in clinical practice. The use of these guidelines often will not have any cost implication for the equipment, as ultrasound machine is almost always available in most neonatal and paediatric intensive care units. ESPNIC will promote the diffusion of these guidelines by appropriate advertisement, links and presentation in the society congresses and training events.

These guidelines have strengths and limitations as any other. Strengths are represented by (1) the fairly subdivided multidisciplinary panellists’ group (including both neonatologists and paediatric intensivists, expert in different POCUS areas and coming from different geographical regions), and (2) the use of a standardised methodology. In several fields, these recommendations are based upon a few studies with moderate/low evidence or based upon experts’ opinions and this is a striking difference compared to similar guidelines in adult critical care. In fact, authors answered to following PICO questions: “Does point-of-care ultrasound for heart/lung/line placement/abdomen/brain provide any clinical advantage in neonatal or paediatric intensive care practice?” (supplementary methods). These questions were purposely quite general, as POCUS is not a therapeutic intervention, but rather a diagnostic and monitoring technique and we expected few randomised controlled trials or high-quality diagnostic accuracy studies about POCUS specifically aiming to improve any particular paediatric/neonatal outcome. Moreover, some of the POCUS applications may not be immediately used in all intensive care units as in ours, because of the specific expertise required in some particular contexts (such as the extremely preterm neonates or non-sedated and non-collaborative patients). However, the existence of formal guidelines may help to improve the local expertise and foster new studies to expand knowledge in this field and refine future recommendations. This is extremely important as further studies are warranted to demonstrate that POCUS actually improves patients’ management and outcome, similar to what has been demonstrated in adult critical care [1‐7, 55]. Another concern is that the clinicians involved are all enthusiastic users of POCUS and this may have theoretically contributed to have ‘too positive’ recommendations. The ESPNIC POCUS Working Group recognises that there are emerging indications for POCUS outside of those listed here and needs for future research steps. Publication of new literature may require future revision and ESPNIC POCUS Working Group is willing to update guidelines accordingly every 3 years.

These guidelines may provide a substrate to develop a POCUS curriculum and structured training programs, which are urgently needed for quality assurance. This guideline paper is not a training statement: requirements and methods of POCUS training should be a sensible follow-up article to this one.

Despite the lack of published evidence-based guidelines specifically for its use in the neonatal and paediatric intensive care units, POCUS is increasingly being used. ESPNIC POCUS guidelines provide the substrate to optimise POCUS use in neonatal and paediatric critical care and guide future research steps according to currently unmet needs. Guidelines may help in making the clinical practice standardised and clinical governance robust.