الفهرس 
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Abstract
Acute gastroenteritis (AGE) is responsible for deaths of millions of children annually worldwide. Viral gastroenteritis is the commonest cause of AGE. It causes varying degrees of dehydration and electrolyte imbalance. Although, the assessment of the degree of dehydration is done mainly by the physician’s gestalt using clinical scales, it has been found that the interobserver variability interferes with accurate results. It is argued that the assessment of pediatric dehydration in an acute care setting is a clinical judgment that can vary from one observer to another due to the subjective nature of many of the signs and symptoms of dehydration. In low-resource settings, ultrasound and its applications have greatly reduced the unnecessary invasive interventions and helped in reduction of admission rates. The use of ultrasound in the diagnosis has been implemented in many practices in the medical field, particularly in the emergent settings. Bedside US (BUS) is rapid, noninvasive, painless, and inexpensive. The introduction of bed-side ultrasonographic techniques to assess the dehydration status in adults and children has been shown to improve the diagnostic accuracy of detecting the degree of dehydration and aids in better evaluation and treatment outcomes. This study concluded that bed-side ultrasound is a potentially useful non-invasive tool for rapid assessment of the hydration status of children in the setting of acute gastroenteritis. Ultrasound measurement of both the IVC and the aortic diameters aids in accurate prediction of the degree of dehydration. Thus, leads to better judgment as an objective adjunct to other clinical scales of evaluation of dehydration. However, further studies should include the use of gold standards of assessing dehydration to validate these data, as well as consider the enrollment of a larger patient cohort so that a normogram of IVC/Ao might be developed to further understand the size and compliance of these vessels in the pediatric population.