Registration is now open for The Detroit SonoCup ultrasound competition, to be held from 8 a.m. to noon June 8 at the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit, known as MOCAD.
The educational contest is open to medical students and emergency medicine residents from metropolitan Detroit-area hospitals and health systems.
Visit http://detroitsonocup.org for more information and to register.
The first Detroit SonoCup, held in 2015 in the School of Medicine's Scott Hall, began with a simple question, said WSU Assistant Professor of Emergency Medicine Ashley Sullivan, M.D. -
"How can we make a four-hour didactic session with traditional classroom teaching into an interactive, exciting and hands-on symposium?
"So we created this event, the Detroit SonoCup, to both educate medical students/residents on the importance of ultrasound and how they can use it in clinical practice, but also to help improve their skills set in using ultrasound," she said.
Dr. Sullivan is associate director of the WSU School of Medicine Department of Emergency Medicine Ultrasound Fellowship.
Participants compete as a team in the first half, with all participants getting the chance to scan and answer questions to earn points. In the second half, teams are seeded and entered into a single elimination tournament. The winner takes home the Ultrasound Cup. For an additional prize, they can enter into the grand finale, a head-to-head competition against four School of Medicine faculty members.
The competition events - including "How Fast is Your Fast?" "Lung/Echo Relay," "Do You Have the Nerve?" "Ultrasound Procedure Relay" and "Rush the RUSH Exam" - incorporate live scanning on volunteers, focused on echocardiography, lung ultrasound, biliary ultrasound, ultrasound of the kidneys and more. The organizers also ask questions on all core ultrasound applications and provide educational tips and tricks, as well as pitfalls to avoid when scanning.
They also use the time to discuss landmark journal articles published in the past several years.
"Ultrasound has become incredibly important in the emergency medicine community. It helps us to make timely diagnoses in our patients, is more cost-effective than other imaging modalities, and uses less ionizing radiation exposure and less department resources," Dr. Sullivan said. "Medical students and residents really enjoy having a more hands-on alternative teaching approach. In medicine, we have long relied on a traditional classroom-based approach. Ultrasound relies not just on medical knowledge, but also forces users to develop and maintain a certain skills set. As with any procedure, ultrasound takes practice. The Detroit SonoCup is able to remove learners from the classroom and put them into an interactive learning environment."