In what I believe is a world first in Emergency Medicine, the Emergency Department in London, Ontario has deployed the first of two 3D printers at the Victoria campus. Once the kinks are worked out, the next printer will be deployed at the University campus.

For some geek talk, we have installed a Reprap Prusa i3 with RAMPS 1.4 electronics, and a single Greg's Wade extruder with a J-head MK V-B 0.4mm nozzle. We will be using Blender and FreeCAD to design, Slic3r to slice and Printrun to print. We will only use PLA plastic, a corn-based biodegradable material.

In this PEP round, Dr. Karl Theakston reviews a recent NEJM article entitled "Mechanisms of acute coronary syndromes and their implications for therapy". Dr. Theakson does an excellent job of summarizing and simplifying the complex explanations for how acute coronary syndromes develop and present.

This video is licensed Creative Commons By Attribution Sharealike Canada 2.5

The role of neuroimaging in diagnosis and prognosis of strokes and TIAs

In this first of a three video series on improving stroke care in London's Emergency Department, Dr. Karl Theakston discusses TIA and strokes. He highlights some of the current evidence on pathophysiology and intervention.

This video is licensed Creative Commons By Attribution Sharealike Canada 2.5

The group at Westernsono holds its monthly ultrasound rounds (UltraRounds) on the last Monday of each block where they review interesting cases from the month.  As the timing and location does not work for all, I have attempted to do a brief recap of some of our discussion and interesting cases.  Enjoy and hope to see you at the next session on March 10, 2014.

Dr. Amit Shah reviews a landmark paper by Mentzelopoulos et al. that shows mortality benefits for a "VSE" protocol - Vasopressin, solumedrol and epinephrine.

Paper:
Vasopressin, steroids, and epinephrine and neurologically favorable survival after in-hospital cardiac arrest: a randomized clinical trial

Mentzelopoulos SD, Malachias S, Chamos C, Konstantopoulos D, Ntaidou T, Papastylianou A, Kolliantzaki I, Theodoridi M, Ischaki H, Makris D, Zakynthinos E, Zintzaras E, Sourlas S, Aloizos S, Zakynthinos SG.

Link to full-text of paper

License: Creative commons By-Attribution ShareAlike 3.0

Congratulations to the Canadian Women's Hockey Team for winning gold last week in Sochi!  Our own Wanda Millard served as the team's physician and sent us some more pictures of the fantastic event.  Congrats Wanda!