Comparison of lung ultrasound and chest radiography for detecting pneumonia in children: a systematic review and meta-analysis

Lung ultrasound (LUS) is recommended as a reliable diagnostic alternative to chest X-ray (CXR) for detecting pneumonia in children.

PubMed, Embase, and Cochrane Library databases were used to identify eligible studies from their inception until April 2023. The investigated diagnostic parameters included sensitivity, specificity, positive likelihood ratio (PLR), negative likelihood ratio (NLR), diagnostic odds ratio (DOR), and area under the receiver operating characteristic curves (AUC).

Twenty-six studies involving 3,401 children were selected for meta-analysis. The sensitivity, specificity, PLR, NLR, DOR, and AUC of LUS for detecting pneumonia in children were 0.95, 0.92, 12.31, 0.05, 108.53, and 0.98, respectively, while the sensitivity, specificity, PLR, NLR, DOR, and AUC of CXR were 0.92, 0.93, 24.63, 0.08, 488.54, and 0.99, respectively. The sensitivity of LUS was higher than that of CXR for detecting pneumonia in children (ratio: 1.03; 95% CI: 1.01–1.06; P = 0.018), whereas the DOR of LUS was significantly lower than that of CXR (ratio: 0.22; 95% CI: 0.06–0.85; P = 0.028).

This study found that the diagnostic performance of LUS was comparable to that of CXR for detecting pneumonia, and the sensitivity of LUS was superior to that of CXR.