South Korean researchers have shown that an offsite physician supervising a novice sonographer via live video over social media can perform as well as an onsite peer.

Specifically, an offsite cardiologist in the experiment was able to accurately evaluate visually estimated ejection fraction—a measurement of blood leaving the patient’s heart with each contraction—while supervising and assessing echocardiography by watching an ultrasound video on a smartphone display.

The research team’s findings were published online May 8 in the Journal of Digital Imaging.

Changsun Kim, PhD, and colleagues at Hanyang University in Seoul compared the onsite and offsite guidance in cases involving 60 completely inexperienced sonographers and 60 ICU patients who required echocardiography.

First, for obvious care-quality reasons, they had the onsite cardiologist complete the echocardiography and determine the ejection fraction.

Then they repeated the test with the offsite cardiologist guiding the sonographer by a social network video call.  

Using rank correlation and plot analysis to compare results gleaned from the two methods, the researchers found excellent agreement, including a correlation coefficient of 0.94 (p < 0.001).

Bland-Altman plotting showed that the average bias was −3.05, and the limit of agreement (−10.3 to 4.2) was narrow, the authors report.

“The offsite expert was able to perform an accurate visual estimation of ejection fraction remotely via a social network video call by mentoring the onsite novice sonographer,” they write.