P558 - RELIABILITY AND ACCURACY OF DIETITIAN RECTUS FEMORIS MUSCLE MEASUREMENTS USING ULTRASOUND, COMPARED TO SONOGRAPHERS

P558

RELIABILITY AND ACCURACY OF DIETITIAN RECTUS FEMORIS MUSCLE MEASUREMENTS USING ULTRASOUND, COMPARED TO SONOGRAPHERS

E. Russell^1,*, D. Nguyen², S. Page¹, A. Lee², M. A. Silvers¹, E. Saxby³, D. Holt^3,4,5, S. Le^3,5, P. Coombs^2,6

¹Nutrition and Dietetics , ²Ultrasound, Monash Imaging, ³Gastroenterology Department, ⁴Clinical Nutrition and Metabolism Unit, Monash Health, ⁵Faculty of Medicine, Nursing and Health Sciences, ⁶Department of Medical Imaging and Radiation Sciences, Monash University, Melbourne, Australia

Rationale: Point-of-care ultrasound (POCUS) muscle measurements are a useful tool for diagnosing myopenia, with particular interest in those with obesity sarcopenia and metabolically demanding conditions such as chronic liver disease (CLD). Our aim was to determine the reliability and accuracy of dietitians using POCUS to measure the rectus femoris muscle after rapid training, compared to sonographers.

Methods: A sonographer designed training program was based on established POCUS protocols and completed by the two study dietitians over 12 hours. In this prospective cohort study, CLD patients were recruited from an outpatient clinic and heathy participants (HP) opportunistically on-site. Participants were across sexes and body mass index (BMI) categories. Two dietitians and two sonographers marked the ultrasound picture. Thickness, width, circumference and surface area were measured. Inter-rater reliability was presented as an intra class correlation (ICC, 95%CI) for reliability, and Bland-Altman assessment for bias and accuracy.

Results: 42 healthy adults and 18 patients with CLD were recruited. ICC across the four raters, four ultrasound measurements and across BMI and sex ranged from 0.73 (good) to 0.96 (excellent) in accuracy (Table 1). For rectus femoris thickness, ICC was similar across both groups: 0.88 (0.82-0.93) in HP and 0.86 (0.71-0.94) in CLD.  Bland-Altman for thickness systematic error of differences between dietitians and sonographers was not statistically significant (0.032cm, p = 0.554).

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Conclusion: With a standardised training protocol, ultrasound-naïve dietitians achieved both reliable and accurate ultrasound measurements when compared to sonographers in both HP and CLD patients and across sex and BMI categories. Future research should address the scalability and generalisability of this training protocol to a larger group of dietitians and across clinical populations.

Disclosure of Interest: None declared