Copyright: ©Author(s) 2026. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial (CC BY-NC 4.0) license. No commercial re-use. See permissions. Published by Baishideng Publishing Group Inc.
World J Gastrointest Surg. Nov 27, 2026; 18(11): 125637
Published online Nov 27, 2026. doi: 10.4240/wjgs.125637
Published online Nov 27, 2026. doi: 10.4240/wjgs.125637
Point-of-care ultrasound in the acute abdomen and gastrointestinal emergencies: An evidence-based guide and the case for standardisation
Faruk Danış, Department of Emergency Medicine, Bolu Abant İzzet Baysal University Faculty of Medicine, Bolu 14030, Türkiye
Emre Kudu, Department of Emergency Medicine, Marmara University School of Medicine, İstanbul 34899, Türkiye
Author contributions: Danış F and Kudu E conceived and designed the review; both authors performed the literature search and the extraction, synthesis and interpretation of the evidence, drafted the manuscript and revised it critically for important intellectual content, designed and reviewed the figures and tables, read and approved the final version to be published, agree to be accountable for all aspects of the work, ensuring that questions related to the accuracy or integrity of any part of the work are appropriately investigated and resolved.
AI contribution statement: AI tools, specifically GPT-5.5, were used solely for language polishing and for clarifying the wording of the reviewers' comments during revision. No AI tool was used to generate research data, to select or interpret the diagnostic estimates reported here, to formulate conclusions, or to generate or select references. All AI-assisted content was critically reviewed and revised by the authors, who take full responsibility for the accuracy, originality, and integrity of the manuscript.
Conflict-of-interest statement: All authors declare no conflict of interest in publishing the manuscript.
Corresponding author: Emre Kudu, MD, Associate Professor, Department of Emergency Medicine, Marmara University School of Medicine, Maltepe Başıbüyük Yolu Sok. No. 9/1 Maltepe, İstanbul 34899, Türkiye. ekudu@marmara.edu.tr
Received: July 14, 2026
Revised: August 12, 2026
Accepted: October 8, 2026
Published online: November 27, 2026
Processing time: 123 Days and 5.6 Hours
Revised: August 12, 2026
Accepted: October 8, 2026
Published online: November 27, 2026
Processing time: 123 Days and 5.6 Hours
Core Tip
Core Tip: This review integrates emergency point-of-care ultrasound for small-bowel obstruction, gastric aspiration risk, non-traumatic free fluid and biliary disease into one symptom-based, pretest-probability-driven algorithm, giving numeric thresholds, likelihood ratios and an explicit action for every result, including non-diagnostic scans. The algorithm has not been prospectively validated. Assembling the evidence also shows that dispersion across operators, thresholds and reference standards, together with absent reliability data for several core measurements, makes standardisation rather than further accuracy estimation the most likely rate-limiting step, a proposition this review frames as testable.