Ultrasound Assessment of Preoperative Gastric Contents for Predicting Aspiration Risk in Surgical Patients: A Scoping Review and Future Directions

Preoperative gastric ultrasound can provide information about gastric contents, thereby aiding in the identification of aspiration risk and enabling the adoption of appropriate anaesthesia strategies. However, existing studies still face limitations, including restricted study populations and sample sizes, variations in operator training, a lack of consensus on an evaluation metric threshold value, and diverse gastric volume calculation models. Future studies should expand their scale, enhance training for clinicians in gastric ultrasound, and standardise assessment positions, threshold values, and selection criteria for calculation models. Furthermore, we believe that integrating artificial intelligence with gastric ultrasound can overcome the limitations of manual measurement, offering a direction for precise and convenient preoperative assessment of gastric contents.