Artificial intelligence-based point-of-care lung ultrasound for screening Covid-19 pneumoniae: comparison with CT scans

Abstract

Abstract Funding Acknowledgements Type of funding sources: None. Background Although lung ultrasound has been reported to be a portable, cost-effective, and accurate method to detect pneumonia, it has not been widely used because of the difficulty in its interpretation. Purpose We aimed to investigate the effectiveness of a novel artificial intelligence-based automated pneumonia detection method using point-of-care lung ultrasound (AI-POCUS) for the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19). Methods We enrolled consecutive patients admitted with COVID-19 who underwent computed tomography (CT) in August and September 2021. A 12-zone AI-POCUS was performed by a novice observer using a pocket-size device within 24 h of the CT scan. Fifteen control subjects were also scanned. Additionally, the accuracy of the simplified 8-zone scan excluding the dorsal chest, was assessed. More than three B-lines detected in one lung zone were considered zone-level positive, and the presence of positive AI-POCUS in any lung zone was considered patient-level positive. The sample size calculation was not performed given the retrospective all-comer nature of the study. Results A total of 577 lung zones from 56 subjects (59.4 ± 14.8 years, 23% female) were evaluated using AI-POCUS. The mean number of days from disease onset was 9, and 14% of patients were under mechanical ventilation. The CT-validated pneumonia was seen in 71.4% of patients at total 577 lung zones (53.3%). The 12-zone AI-POCUS for detecting CT-validated pneumonia in the patient-level showed the accuracy of 94.5% (85.1% – 98.1%), sensitivity of 92.3% (79.7% – 97.3%), specificity of 100% (80.6% – 100%), positive predictive value of 95.0% (89.6% − 97.7%), and Kappa of 0.33 (0.27 – 0.40). When simplified with 8-zone scan, the accuracy, sensitivity, and sensitivity were 83.9% (72.2% – 91.3%), 77.5% (62.5% – 87.7%), and 100% (80.6% – 100%), respectively. The zone-level accuracy, sensitivity, and specificity of AI-POCUS were 65.3% (61.4% – 69.1%), 37.2% (32.0% – 42.7%), and 97.8 % (95.2% – 99.0%), respectively. Conclusion AI-POCUS using the novel pocket-size ultrasound system showed excellent agreement with CT-validated COVID-19 pneumonia, even when used by a novice observer.