ArticleArchives of academic emergency medicine2026
Comparing the Accuracy of Patient-Perceived Fever, Manual Fever Checking, and Non-Contact Frontal Infrared Thermometer; A Cross-sectional Study.
Article in Archives of academic emergency medicine, 2026. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Not yet cited in PubMed.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
0 citing papers in PubMed.
No citing paper in PubMed yet.
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
9 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Introduction: Non-contact frontal infrared thermometers (NCFITs) have gained popularity following the COVID-19 pandemic, but their accuracy remains debated. This study compared the accuracy of three index tests of patient-perceived fever (PPF), manual fever checking (MFC) by emergency nurses, and NCFIT against tympanic thermometer (TT). Methods: This single center, diagnostic accuracy study evaluated adult patients in the triage area of the emergency department (ED) between May and September 2023. Five emergency nurses (ENs) examined patients using convenience sampling with index tests, followed by TT measurement for fever detection as standard test (T≥38°C). The sensitivity, specificity, positive and negative likelihood ratios (PLR and NLR) and accuracy, of PPF, MFC, and NCFIT in detecting the fever were measured and reported with 95% confidence interval (CI). The inter-rater reliability of ENs for MFC among 10 patients (outside the study) was 100%. Results: We included 279 patients with the mean age of 52.2 ± 16.98 years (51.97% male). TT identified 147 as febrile and 132 as non-febrile. The most sensitive index test was MFC, achieving 100% (95%CI: 97.5-100.0) sensitivity, 0 NLR, and 8.25 (95%CI: 5.7-12.1) PLR, with moderate accuracy (93.9% (95%CI: 89.9-96.0)). NCFIT demonstrated the lowest sensitivity (85.71% (95%CI: 78.9-90.9)) but the highest specificity (98.48% (95%CI: 93.6-99.5)) and accuracy (97.5% (95%CI: 93.1-99.8)). When the fever threshold for NCFIT was lowered to 37.5°C, sensitivity increased to 99% (95%CI: 97.4-99.9), NLR decreased to 0.01 (95%CI: 0-0.6), and PLR rose to 49.5 (95%CI: 20.8-90.2), while specificity remained at 98% (95%CI: 94-99.6). Conclusion: MFC/PPF could rule out fever but required NCFIT/TT to rule it in. However, NCFIT achieved the highest NLR and PLR when its fever threshold was set at 37.5 °C.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.