Pediatricians looking for alternative ways to diagnose childhood pneumonia may have another effective tool at their disposal: the lung ultrasound (LUS). LUS had high specificity and sensitivity in the hands of trained clinicians. Pediatric pneumonia is the number one cause of death by illness in children worldwide. It can be especially difficult to diagnose because symptoms vary according to a child's age and the cause of infection.
In addition, some symptoms are not exclusive to childhood pneumonia but can indicate other illnesses as well. Clinicians often use chest radiographs to help diagnosis pneumonia, but it is not always accurate and can be prohibitively expensive for low-resource areas. Most studies in the analysis had a low number of subjects and that the number of studies analyzed was small. In addition, although the overall rigor of the studies was high, there were distinct…
