Evaluation of lung ultrasound for the diagnosis of pneumonia in the ED

Gargani

et al. 2012

Pediatric Pulmonology

181

161

Summary. Background: The diagnosis of community-acquired pneumonia (CAP) is based mainly on the patient's medical history and physical examination. However, in severe cases a further evaluation including chest X-ray (CXR) may be necessary. At present, lung ultrasound (LUS) is not included in the diagnostic work-up of pneumonia. Aim: To describe the ultrasonographic appearance of CAP at presentation and during the follow-up. Methods: A total of 102 patients with clinical signs and symptoms suggesting pneumonia, who underwent a clinically driven CXR, were evaluated by LUS on the same day. LUS signs of pneumonia included subpleural lung consolidation, B-lines, pleural line abnormalities, and pleural effusion. The diagnostic gold standard was the ex-post diagnosis of pneumonia made by two independent experienced pediatricians on the basis of clinical presentation, CXR and clinical course following British Thoracic Guidelines recommendations. Results: A final diagnosis of pneumonia was confirmed in 89/102 patients. LUS was positive for the diagnosis of pneumonia in 88/89 patients, whereas CXR was positive in 81/89. Only one patient with normal LUS examination had an abnormal CXR, whereas 8 patients with normal CXR had an abnormal LUS. LUS was able to detect pleural effusion resulting from complicated pneumonia in 16 cases, whereas CXR detected pleural effusion in 3 cases. Conclusions: LUS is a simple and reliable imaging tool, not inferior to CXR in identifying pleuro-pulmonary alterations in children with suspected pneumonia. During the course of the disease, LUS allows a radiation-free follow-up of these abnormalities.

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Lung ultrasound characteristics of community‐acquired pneumonia in hospitalized children

Gargani

et al. 2012

Pediatric Pulmonology

181

161

“…The cause of lung consolidation can be diagnosed by analyzing the sonographic features of the lesion [39,40]. Accuracy of lung ultrasound in the diagnosis and differential diagnosis of lung consolidation has been tested in different settings [36,[41][42][43][44] and showed good accuracy compared with CXR [43,[45][46][47][48]. In pleuritic pain, lung ultrasound is superior to CXR and may allow visualization of radio-occult pulmonary conditions [47,48].…”

Section: B-d4-s9 (No Consensus: Level N/a)mentioning

confidence: 99%

International evidence-based recommendations for point-of-care lung ultrasound

et al. 2012

Self Cite

Background: The purpose of this study is to provide evidence-based and expert consensus recommendations for lung ultrasound with focus on emergency and critical care settings. Methods: A multidisciplinary panel of 28 experts from eight countries was involved. Literature was reviewed from January 1966 to June 2011. Consensus members searched multiple databases including Pubmed, Medline, OVID, Embase, and others. The process used to develop these evidence-based recommendations involved two phases: determining the level of quality of evidence and developing the recommendation. The quality of evidence is assessed by the grading of recommendation, assessment, development, and evaluation (GRADE) method. However, the GRADE system does not enforce a specific method on how the panel should reach decisions during the consensus process. Our methodology committee decided to utilize the RAND appropriateness method for panel judgment and decisions/consensus. Results: Seventythree proposed statements were examined and discussed in three conferences held in Bologna, Pisa, and Rome. Each conference included two rounds of face-to-face modified Delphi technique. Anonymous panel voting followed each round. The panel did not reach an agreement and therefore did not adopt any recommendations for six statements. Weak/ conditional recommendations were made for 2 statements, and strong recommendations were made for the remaining 65 statements. The statements were then recategorized and grouped to their current format. Internal and external peer-review processes took place before submission of the recommendations. Updates will occur at least every 4 years or whenever significant major changes in evidence appear. Conclusions: This document reflects the overall results of the first consensus conference on ''point-of-care'' lung ultrasound. Statements were discussed and elaborated by experts who published the vast majority of papers on clinical use of lung ultrasound in the last 20 years. Recommendations were produced to guide implementation, development, and standardization of lung ultrasound in all relevant settings.

“…Among all 14 studies, 11 were carried out in emergency department (ED) or medical wards (10,(15)(16)(17)(18)(19)(20)(22)(23)(24)(25), and 3 were conducted in intensive care unit (ICU) (14,21,26). Hemithorax was used as the study unit for result interpretation in one study (23), while others counted by patient.…”

Section: Characteristics Of Selected Studiesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Effectiveness of lung ultrasonography for diagnosis of pneumonia in adults: a systematic review and meta-analysis

Yang¹,

Ying²,

Wang³

et al. 2016

J. Thorac. Dis.

Background: Pneumonia is usually presented as a forgotten killer, and an early diagnosis could largely improve the prognostic outcomes. Lung ultrasound (LUS) has been universally applied in evaluating multiple pulmonary diseases including pneumonia. However, the diagnosis accuracy of LUS for pneumonia in adults is still uncertain. Hence, we performed a systematic review of the current literature to assess the diagnosis accuracy of LUS for pneumonia in adults.Methods: PubMed and EMBASE were searched for clinical trials that assessed the detection accuracy of LUS for pneumonia in adult patients. We extracted descriptive and quantitative information from eligible studies that met strict inclusion criteria and calculated pooled sensitivity, specificity and pooled diagnostic likelihood ratios (LR). Summary receiver operating characteristic (sROC) curve was used to assess the overall performance of LUS-based assays.Results: We reviewed 1,072 articles and selected 38 for detailed review. 14 articles containing 1,911 participants met all inclusion criteria and were included in the final analysis. LUS exhibited a pooled sensitivity of 0.904 (0.884-0.921), specificity of 0.884 (0.861-0.904), positive LR of 6.6 (3.7-11.7), negative LR of 0.08 (0. 04-0.19) and the area under curve (AUC) was 0.9611. Interestingly, when CT alone, CT combined with clinical presentations, and microbiology was set as the gold standard of pneumonia respectively, LUS demonstrated a pooled sensitivity of 90.9%, 95.0%, 53.3%, and a pooled specificity of 89.7%, 91.3% and 67.9%. In extension, we compared the diagnostic efficiency of LUS for pneumonia with chest X-ray (CXR) in 1,343 patients. The AUC for LUS and CXR was 0.972 and 0.867 respectively and the Z statistic of the two sROC curves was 2.31.Conclusions: Our study indicated that LUS is a robust diagnostic tool for pneumonia with high accuracy.Utilization of LUS would facilitate the estimation of pneumonia at bedside. be based on swift and accurate recognition. The signs and symptoms localizing to the respiratory system, commonly referring as dyspnea, cough and fever, laboratory alterations (leukocytosis and increased c-reactive protein/procalcitonin) in conjunction with radiographic pulmonary infiltrate, point to convincing diagnosis of pneumonia. Imaging evaluation approaches recommended on current guidelines are chest radiograph and chest computerized tomography (CT) (2,3). However, limitations for their use exist (4). Surprisingly, a recent study compared CXR to chest CT scan for suspected CAP. They found up to 30% false positive and false negative rate of CXR in emergency department (ED), which doubted the value of CXR on pneumonia diagnosis (5). Thus, it's reasonable to figure out the alternative way to provide promising imaging evidence of pneumonia.Ultrasonography is gaining more attention in critical care and emergency medicine. A good body of studies has proven that ultrasonography is highly effective in evaluating multiple pulmonary diseases, such as metastatic lymph node of lung c...