Thesis (Ph.D.) - Cairo University - Faculty of Medicine - Department of Radio-diagnosis

Objective: To evaluate the role of bedside thoracic ultrasonography and compare it with the bedside chest radiography (CXR) and thoracic computed tomography (CT) for the detection of various chest pathologic abnormalities in ICUcritically ill patients. Patients and Methods: This study was prospective comparative study conducted upon 51randomly selected patients; 31 males and 20 females with a mean age of 57.52 ± 17.23 years in theintensive care unitand Radiology departmentof Kasr Al- Ainy hospital- CairoUniversityfrom November 2017 to July 2019. All patients were subjected to thorough clinical examination,bedside CXRand transthoracic ultrasonography (TUS), while in only 23 patients CT chest was feasible.Standard diagnostic indices including sensitivity, specificity, positive Predictive value (PPV), negative predictive value (NPV) and accuracy were calculated. Hypothesis tests of two proportion are applied to compare any two diagnostic values.Significance level is considered at P value < 0.05. Results:The main pathologies were pleural effusion, pleural irregularities, interstitial lung syndrome, lung consolidation, lung masses and/or nodules and pericardial effusion.Regarding pleural effusion diagnosis,TUS was more sensitive and more accurate than CXR in detection of pleural effusion with statistically significant p value (<0.001) and TUS was superior to CT chest in characterization of the nature of effusion

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