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Dr. Indrani Bhattacharjee, neonatologist and POCUS program director at Tufts Medical Center in Boston, joins Ben to discuss a fascinating and largely unexplored frontier — intestinal ultrasound in healthy preterm infants. Rather than waiting for NEC to appear, her team has been systematically scanning babies born under 32 weeks every week from one week of age until eight weeks or discharge, building what may be the first normative dataset for bowel wall thickness in this population. Early findings are already challenging the standard radiological definitions, showing that extremely preterm babies have thinner bowel walls than current benchmarks would classify as normal — raising the question of whether definitions derived from term or older patients have ever been appropriate for our tiniest babies. The publication is forthcoming in the European Journal of Pediatrics.

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