Lung ultrasound assessment of acute respiratory distress syndrome caused by coronavirus disease 2019: An observational study

Background: An outbreak of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) took place in Wuhan, China, by the end of 2019, and the disease continues to spread all over the world. The number of patients is increasing rapidly, a large number of infected patients is critically ill, and the mortality is high. However, information on COVID-19 patients is limited, and its clinical characteristics have not been fully studied. Objectives: To compare the performances of point-of-care lung ultrasound (LUS) and bedside chest X-ray in assessing the condition of COVID-19 patients with acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS). Methods: This observational study enrolled 42 COVID-19 patients with ARDS who were admitted to the Department of Critical Care Medicine of the Wuhan Union Hospital from February to April 2020. The point-of-care LUS characteristics of the COVID-19 patients with ARDS were summarized, and the performances of LUS and bedside chest X-ray in assessing the patient’s condition were compared. Results: Most of the 42 patients were elderly individuals with chronic clinical diseases. The proportion of patients older than 60 years old was 85.7%. All patients were given invasive mechanical ventilation; eight (19.0%) of them received venovenous extracorporeal membrane oxygenation support. LUS has evident advantages in detecting lung consolidation, patchy shadows, and pleural thickening, and pleural line changes in particular. The receiver operating characteristic analysis indicated that the sensitivity, Youden index, and kappa value for detecting COVID-19 patients with ARDS were higher for LUS than the chest X-ray. Conclusion: LUS has better diagnostic accuracy and sensitivity in COVID-19 patients with ARDS than the chest X-ray.