Self‐conducted sonographic monitoring of the knee in patients with haemophilia—A feasibility study

Introduction/aim To evaluate whether patients with haemophilia (PwH) can be enabled to perform ultrasonography (US) of their knees without supervision according to the Haemophilia Early Arthropathy Detection with Ultrasound (HEAD‐US) protocol and whether they would be able to recognize pathologies. Methods Five PwH (mean age 29.6 years, range 20–48 years) were taught the use of a portable US device and the HEAD‐US protocol. Subsequently, the patients performed US unsupervised at home three times a week for a total of 6 weeks with a reteaching after 2 weeks. All images were checked for mapping of the landmarks defined in the HEAD‐US protocol by a radiologist. In a final test after the completion of the self‐sonography period, participants were asked to identify scanning plane and potential pathology from US images of other PwH. Results On the images of the self‐performed scans, 82.7% of the possible anatomic landmarks could be identified and 67.5% of the requested images were unobjectionable, depicting 100% of the required landmarks. There was a highly significant improvement in image quality following reteaching after 2 weeks (74.80 ± 36.88% vs. 88.31 ± 19.87%, p