Point-of-Care Ultrasound for Guiding Pulmonary Artery Catheter Placement

In critical care, bedside clinicians often use point-of-care ultrasound (POCUS) as an adjunct for active management. Advantages of POCUS include its ready availability at the bedside, real-time noninvasive imaging capability, and documentability in terms of image recording. Authors have described pulmonary artery catheter (PAC) placement in the medical literature using transesophageal echocardiography (TEE)1 and transthoracic echocardiography.2-5 However, none of these approaches has been described being performed solely from the head, where typical PAC insertion occurs via the right jugular vein.