You may have a lab at the school that has ultrasound equipment. You may have had the opportunity to scan there a couple of times or more before starting your clinical. Do not think that the time that you have had in front of a unit already is enough to know what you will encounter at the clinical site. Every unit is different. The equipment that is in your lab is likely not what you will have in the department at your clinical site. Even if it is, there is so much more to learn about it than you will get in a few sessions.

At the beginning of your clinical assignment, any time there is a unit in the department that is not being utilized by an official scan, take that time to get in front of it. Play with all the controls. Learn what each does. Practice annotating, know which words are under preset annotation keys and learn how to access them. Practice typing with one hand (usually your left) using words that you will likely have to type on an exam. Learn how to move the annotation around, how to delete it. Discover where the controls are for overall gain, TGC, focus, depth, color, and spectral Doppler. Learn how to freeze and unfreeze an image, and where the “cine” controls are. If you do not know what a key does, find out. Play with the calipers, turn them on and off, move them, set them, remove them. Create an image,freeze it, capture and store it. If the department has more than one type of ultrasound equipment, learn them all. Know how to change transducers and to change megahertz.

Familiarize yourself with transducer orientation so that any time you pick up any transducer you know which end should be toward the patient head or right side of the body to produce the correct image orientation. Learn how to bring up any preset exam protocols, and how to change the preset parameters if you need to. If you cannot find something, ask where it is. Different equipment manufacturers label things differently. Some have soft keys where features are hidden behind other keys.

Turn out the lights and practice finding the most commonly used features in the dark, without looking at the control panel. When you begin to scan on your own, every minute you are not looking for a specific control is another minute spent on imaging and scanning. Believe me, that translates into a huge amount of time.