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Thoracic ultrasonography versus chest radiography for detection of pneumothoraces: challenges in deriving and interpreting summary diagnostic accuracy estimates.
Crit Care. 2014;18(2):416
Authors: Roberts DJ, Niven DJ, James MT, Ball CG, Kirkpatrick AW
Abstract
Alrajab and colleagues recently conducted a meta-analysis examining the diagnostic accuracy of thoracic ultrasonography (US) or chest radiography (CXR) versus a reference standard of thoracic computed tomography for detection of pneumothoraces. They reported that while the pooled specificity of US (98%) was similar to CXR (99%), the pooled sensitivity (79%) was substantially higher (40%) . They also found that, although US performance was inferior when conducted on trauma or nonconsecutively sampled patients, it improved when performed by emergency physicians or using a linear probe . We highlight two important issues exemplified.
PMID: 24976173 [PubMed - in process]