Hello, and welcome back to HackRack. I'm Jed Wollplot, and I'm thrilled to have with me today a new crew of anesthesiologists from Ohio State.

They work with some of the other folks from our Ohio State that I've interviewed before, but this is a new group, really fantastic folks.

And I think we're going to have a great discussion. I've got with me today, Dr. Rafal Copintric, Dr. Omar Alkudzi, and Dr. Amar Bhatt.

And the first two folks, Rafal Anomar, are critical care anesthesiologists. As is Amar, Amar is also a cardiac anesthesiologist, so he does both.

And we're going to have a really interesting discussion today about their work looking at right ventricular failure in COVID patients.

And as you see, as we go through that, we're going to be talking a lot about how they used ultrasound and focus critical care ultrasound to assess these patients.

And then that'll lead us into a discussion about the new exam to get certified in critical care ultrasound, kind of what that's about and how people can look at that if they're interested.

And then we'll talk about a little bit broader discussion of focus in anesthesiology for folks out there who are interested in learning more.

It's going to be a great and guys welcome to the show.

Thank you. Thank you. So pleasure.

I do want to give a quick shout out to the newest member of our ACRAC team. That's Ryan Okonsky. Ryan is our new social media manager.

He's taking over for April, who's done an amazing job, but we'll be starting her intern year.

And so we'll not have time to be doing the job for another year. So Ryan's going to be taking over. We're excited to have him on board.

And thanks, Ryan, for joining the team. All right. Let's jump now into our first topic, which is let's talk a little bit about right ventricular failure in ARDS in general and in COVID-19.

Rafal, why don't you give us some background there?

Yes. Yes. How you guys doing? Thanks for having us again.

As you know, patients with ARDS have significant prevalence of ARD dysfunction that has been described.

So about 22 to 50% of patients who develop ARDS end up with having a right ventricular dysfunction.

And the reason why that's significant is because certain studies also have shown that the ARD dysfunction is associated with mortality.

So as the COVID pandemic started, the first cases described by the Chinese and then quickly in the US, the prevalence of ARD dysfunction was being published.

When our our patient cohorts started in the end of March in the beginning of April, we have also noticed that there was quite a few RV dysfunction that our patients have been developing.

And more specifically, there were patients on ECMO. So we wanted to see if there's any sort of difference between our regular ARDS and RVD, or is there actually something more going on with these particular COVID patients.

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