ArticleBMC medical imaging2017
Assessment of thoracic ultrasound in complementary diagnosis and in follow up of community-acquired pneumonia (cap).
Article in BMC medical imaging, 2017. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 17 papers, 2 of them syntheses that pooled it.
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17 citing papers in PubMed, 2 syntheses or guidelines pooled it, 40 citations in OpenAlex.
- Recommendations for Lung Ultrasound in Internal Medicine.Diagnostics (Basel, Switzerland) · 2020Guideline
- Pooled it
- Pediatric lung ultrasound: Tips and tricks for better scanning and interpretation.Multidisciplinary respiratory medicine · 2026Article
- Thoracic ultrasound use in hospitalized and ambulatory adult patients: a quantitative picture.The ultrasound journal · 2024Article
- Article
- Advances in diagnostic tools for respiratory tract infections: from tuberculosis to COVID-19 - changing paradigms?ERJ open research · 2022Review
- Effectiveness and Safety of Transthoracic Ultrasound in Guiding Percutaneous Needle Biopsy in the Lung and Comparison vs. CT Scan in Assessing Morphology of Subpleural Consolidations.Diagnostics (Basel, Switzerland) · 2021Article
- Serial lung ultrasounds in pediatric pneumonia in Mozambique and Pakistan.Scientific reports · 2021Observational
- Lung Ultrasound in Patients With Dyspnea From Infective Lung Disease.Frontiers in medicine · 2021Article
- Point-of-care lung ultrasound for the assessment of pneumonia: a narrative review in the COVID-19 era.Journal of medical ultrasonics (2001) · 2021Review
- Transthoracic Ultrasound in Infectious Organizing Pneumonia: A Useful Guide for Percutaneous Needle Biopsy.Frontiers in medicine · 2021Article
- COVID-19 Pneumonia: The Great Ultrasonography Mimicker.Frontiers in medicine · 2021Article
- Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Lung Ultrasound in Infectious Pulmonary Disease.Frontiers in medicine · 2021Article
- Chest Imaging in the Diagnosis and Management of Pulmonary Tuberculosis: The Complementary Role of Thoraci Ultrasound.Frontiers in medicine · 2021Article
- The lung ultrasound: facts or artifacts? In the era of COVID-19 outbreak.La Radiologia medica · 2020Review
- Providing safe and effective pleural medicine services in the UK: an aspirational statement from UK pleural physicians.BMJ open respiratory research · 2018Article
- Review
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Authors and funding
9 authors at 3 institutions in 2 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
backgroundChest X-ray (CXR) is the primary diagnostic tool for community-acquired pneumonia (CAP). Some authors recently proposed that thoracic ultrasound (TUS) could valuably flank or even reliably substitute CXR in the diagnosis and follow-up of CAP. We investigated the clinical utility of TUS in a large sample of patients with CAP, to challenge the hypothesis that it may be a substitute for CXR.
methodsOut of 645 consecutive patients with a CXR-confirmed CAP diagnosed in the emergency room of our hospital over a three-years period, 510 were subsequently admitted to our department of Internal Medicine. These patients were evaluated by TUS by a well-trained operator who was blinded of the initial diagnosis. TUS scans were performed both at admission and repeated at day 4-6th and 9-14th during stay.
resultsTUS identified 375/510 (73.5%) of CXR-confirmed lesions, mostly located in posterior-basal or mid-thoracic areas of the lungs. Pleural effusion was detected in 26.9% of patients by CXR and in 30.4% by TUS. TUS documented the change in size of the consolidated areas as follows: 6.3 ± 3.4 cm at time 0, 2.5 ± 1.8 at 4-6 d, 0.9 ± 1.4 at 9-14 d. Out of the 12 patients with delayed CAP healing, 7 of them turned out to have lung cancer.
conclusionsTUS allowed to detect lung consolidations in over 70% of patients with CXR-confirmed CAP, but it gave false negative results in 26.5% of cases. Our longitudinal results confirm the role of TUS in the follow-up of detectable lesions. Thus, TUS should be regarded as a complementary and monitoring tool in pneumonia, instead of a primary imaging modality.
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