Airway management is one of the critical skills mastered by anaesthesiologists and it is their prime responsibility. Suboptimal airway management is a major cause of patient morbidity and mortality. Unanticipated difficult laryngoscopy and intubation remains one of the most important concerns and challenges in routine anaesthesia practice. Accurate airway assessment may reduce the number of unanticipated difficult laryngoscopy and intubation, as well as enable modification of initial airway management plan. The currently employed routine clinical airway assessment parameters when used alone or in combination are however unable to predict difficult laryngoscopy and intubation with satisfactory sensitivity and specificity.

Ultrasound machines are now widely available in operating rooms and is becoming an inherent part of anaesthesiologist’s armamentarium for vascular access and regional anaesthesia. Ultrasound is safe, non-invasive, portable, easily reproducible  and gives real time images. Sonography has been used for airway assessment and has been evolving as a useful tool for this purpose. Encouraging results have been obtained in few studies utilising the sonographic parameters for assessment of airway. However, there are no established standard sonographic parameters to predict difficult laryngoscopy. Hence, the present study is designed to evaluate any correlation between sonographically assessed parameters and the grade of difficulty at direct laryngoscopy.