Current Ultrasound Technologies and Instrumentation in the Assessment and Monitoring of COVID-19 Positive Patients

Abstract

Since the emergence of the COVID-19 pandemic in December of 2019, clinicians and scientists all over the world have faced overwhelming new challenges that not only threaten their own communities and countries but also the world at large. These challenges have been enormous and debilitating, as the infrastructure of many countries, including developing ones, had little or no resources to deal with the crisis. Even in developed countries, such as Italy, health systems have been so inundated by cases that health care facilities became oversaturated and could not accommodate the unexpected influx of patients to be tested. Initially, resources were focused on testing to identify those who were infected. When it became clear that the virus mainly attacks the lungs by causing parenchymal changes in the form of multifocal pneumonia of different levels of severity, imaging became paramount in the assessment of disease severity, progression, and even response to treatment. As a result, there was a need to establish protocols for imaging of the lungs in these patients. In North America, the focus was on chest X-ray and computed tomography (CT) as these are widely available and accessible at most health facilities. However, in Europe and China, this was not the case, and a cost-effective and relatively fast imaging modality was needed to scan a large number of sick patients promptly. Hence, ultrasound (US) found its Manuscript

Mini-COVIDNet: Efficient Lightweight Deep Neural Network for Ultrasound Based Point-of-Care Detection of COVID-19

“…Previous studies proposed that critical care ultrasound (CCUS) can be utilized for monitoring the progression of the COVID-19 pneumonia [16], [17]. Since the disease progression varies and US imaging is cheap, noninvasive, and nonradiating, it is the preferred modality of choice for widespread use.…”

“…Since the disease progression varies and US imaging is cheap, noninvasive, and nonradiating, it is the preferred modality of choice for widespread use. The US imaging can be performed daily for patients having severe infection of the lungs due to COVID-19 for better management [16], [17]. The recent work [18] utilizes POCUS for diagnosis of COVID-19 and was found to be very effective for rapid screening as well as diagnosis of COVID-19 in symptomatic patients.…”

The role of lung ultrasonography in evaluation of COVID-19 pneumonia

“…If long vertical rays (B-lines) are detected, pneumonia is considered. 13 Normally, the US beam is unable to penetrate the airfilled alveoli due to acoustic reflection at the tissue air interface. When there is fluid within the alveoli secondary to infection, however, the US beam is able to be transmitted across the pleural line into the fluid and thus a B-line in the image is formed.…”

“…16,35 Patients movement is restricted in an isolated room and radiation exposure to healthcare staff is limited. 13 For performing LUS, fewer people are required. When compared to CT, there is less equipment to clean.…”

LBP-based information assisted intelligent system for COVID-19 identification

“…Another deep neural network model COVID-Net is designed in [ 9 ] and other methods are also proposed [ 10 ]. Some researchers have used the ultrasound technique to monitor the COVID-19 positive patients [ 11 ]. The chest CT scans are used for ensemble support vector machine-based model development for COVID-19 detection [ 12 ].…”