• Qian-Jing Hu, Yong-Chun Shen, Liu-Qun Jia, Shu-Jin Guo, Hong-Yu Long, Cai-Shuang Pang, Ting Yang, and Fu-Qiang Wen.
• Department of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine, West China Hospital of Sichuan University and Division of Pulmonary Diseases, State Key Laboratory of Biotherapy of China Chengdu 610041, China.
• Int J Clin Exp Med. 2014 Jan 1;7(1):115-21.

Background And ObjectivePneumonia is a common disease with both high morbidity and mortality, the diagnosis of pneumonia remains a clinical challenge. Many studies have been conducted to identify the usefulness of lung ultrasound for the diagnosis of pneumonia, but with inconsistent and inconclusive results. The present study aimed to establish the overall diagnostic accuracy of lung ultrasound in diagnosing pneumonia.MethodsBased on a comprehensive search of the Pubmed, Embase, and the Cochrane database, we identified out-come data from all articles estimating diagnostic accuracy with lung ultrasound for pneumonia. Quality was assessed with the Quality Assessment for Diagnostic Accuracy Studies. Results from different studies were pooled using a bivariate meta-analysis. Summary receiver operating characteristic curve was used to assess the overall performance of lung ultrasound-based assays.ResultsNine studies containing 1080 subjects were included in this meta-analysis. The summary estimates for lung ultrasound in the diagnosis of pneumonia in the studies included were as follows: sensitivity, 0.97 (95% CI: 0.93-0.99); specificity, 0.94 (95% CI: 0.85-0.98); DOR, 507.99 (95% CI: 128.11-2014.34); positive likelihood ratio, 15.62 (95% CI: 6.31-38.68); negative likelihood ratio, 0.03 (95% CI: 0.01-0.08); The area under the summary receiver operating characteristic curve was 0.99 (95% CI: 0.98-1.00).ConclusionLung ultrasound is a capable of diagnosing pneumonia with high accuracy and is a promising attractive alternative to chest radiography and thoracic CT scan.

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