Contemporary clinical applications of venous excess ultrasound: A scoping review protocol.

Abstract

This scoping review aims to synthesise the primary literature on the current and emerging clinical applications of venous excess ultrasound, with a particular interest in its use beyond acute and critical care contexts. Venous excess ultrasound is a novel point-of-care ultrasound tool designed to assess systemic venous congestion. While it has been widely adopted in critical and acute care settings, increasing clinical interest suggests broader diagnostic, prognostic, and therapeutic utility beyond these contexts. Despite this, no comprehensive synthesis has yet mapped the full range of its clinical applications. We will include primary studies involving patients of any age or clinical indication in which venous excess ultrasound has been applied in clinical care. Only studies published in English from 1 January 2020 onward will be considered. Inclusion is limited to studies reporting on the clinical utility of venous excess ultrasound. Non-human studies, abstract-only publications, secondary reviews, and purely technical imaging studies without clinical application will be excluded. Following PRISMA-ScR guidelines, this scoping review will conduct systematic searches of both peer-reviewed and grey literature sources, including PubMed, Scopus, the Cochrane Library, ProQuest, Google Scholar, preprint servers, and clinical trial registries. Where literature sources allow, searches will be limited to studies written in English and published from 1 January 2020 onward. References will be managed and deduplicated using Zotero. Full-text screening and data extraction will be performed independently by two reviewers using Rayyan and standardised Microsoft Excel forms. Disagreements will be resolved through discussion or, if necessary, by a third reviewer. Results will be summarised in tables and narratively.