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Chest sonography in diagnosis of childhood pneumonia: A single-center experience

Objective: The objective of this study was to determine the diagnostic accuracy of chest sonography (CS) in diagnosis of pneumonia among children. Materials and Methods: This present cross-sectional analytical diagnostic study was conducted in the department of pediatrics of Western Odisha over a period of 2 years after institutional ethics committee approval. Totally 1475 children with clinical diagnosis of pneumonia were enrolled by a simple convenient sampling technique after getting written informed consent from their parents and/or guardian. The children with congenital anomalies, immunocompromised conditions, critically ill, and CS done after 24 h of chest radiography (CR) were excluded from the study. CS and CR were performed on 1475 children, and CR was taken as the gold standard for diagnosis of pneumonia in this study. All the relevant statistics were done by appropriate statistical software. Results: Out of 1475 children, 911 (68.8%) were male and 563 (38.2%) were female. The mean age of the study population was 3.94 ± 3.42 years. The sensitivity of CS was 99.6% (98.8%, 99.9%), specificity: 89.3 (86.8%–91.4%), positive predictive value: 90.5% (88.3%–92.4%), negative predictive value: 99.5% (98.7%–99.9%), and diagnostic accuracy of 83.62%. Conclusion: CS can be used as a good screening tool for early detection of pneumonia among children.