Portable imaging technology, mainly point-of-care ultrasound (POCUS), is becoming more prevalent in prehospital care for trauma and medical calls. The portability of POCUS allows for the potential to help refine the working diagnosis, guide field interventions, and assist in refining prehospital triage. The objective of this work is to identify gaps in the research by compiling existing evidence on prehospital US, and determine whether it improves patient survival and long-term outcomes. Consensus—an AI academic search engine—was used to obtain evidence from over 170 million research papers, including Semantic Scholar, PubMed, and other trusted databases to scan studies on prehospital imaging. From this search, 50 papers were ultimately categorized as the most relevant papers given the presented parameters: POCUS, prehospital, diagnostic accuracy, patient management, and outcomes. Factors such as recency and strength of provided evidence were ultimately used to rank the papers, along with exclusion of other imaging modalities. Current literature suggests that the use of prehospital US does help improve diagnostic accuracy in both trauma and non-trauma calls, particularly in cases involving major respiratory or cardiac abnormalities. For trauma patients, the use of Focused Assessment with Sonography for Trauma (FAST) and extended FAST scans was shown to alter patient management in 6%–49% of cases; additionally, this change in management influenced the destination hospital or the transport modality of the patient in 22% of cases. Despite this, the current evidence is largely observational and heterogeneous, which limits conclusions regarding survival and long-term patient outcomes. The effect of prehospital US on these outcomes remains unproven because the available evidence is quite limited. There is still a need for outcome-focused trials that highlight the true impact of prehospital US. This may be done by creating larger population studies that implement standardized training to reduce the heterogeneity and bias present in current studies.
