It is that time of year again with new residents and fellows for ultrasound programs. Many Emergency Medicine programs are now using digital arching solutions for their ultrasound studies. Also becoming popular are the use of middleware and/or PACS systems for quality assurance and education/feedback.
One problem that occurs if you are using a SonoSite system is that the studies are saved to the hard drive or internal memory before transmission to the middleware system, such as Q-Path. Eventually the internal memory of the ultrasound unit will fill up. When the memory is full the boot time can be longer and performance may suffer. Most importantly you will NOT be able to save further studies to the hard drive in order to transmit to the arching solution you use.
Someone has to clear the memory periodically. Unfortunately if you have several sites this could become a problem with schedules and new people in the program. This short video is a walk through of how to clear the memory on the M-Turbo system from SonoSite, it also works for the Edge system. Feel free to distribute the link to you people in your program or if you get that late night call asking how to clear the memory.
