Ultrasound for diagnosing new difficult laryngoscopy indicator

Unpredictable difficult laryngoscopy (DL) remains a challenge for anesthesiologists, especially when difficult ventilation occurs during standard laryngoscopy. Accurate airway assessment should always be performed, but the common airway assessment methods only perform superficial screening. Thus, the deep laryngopharyngeal anatomy may not be evaluated. Ultrasound-based airway assessment has been recently proposed as a useful, simple, and non-invasive bedside tool as an adjunct to clinical methods, which may facilitate identification of DL. The present study aimed to determine the correlation between ultrasound-measured indicators and DL.