Lung Ultrasound Protocol and Quality Control of Image Interpretation Using an Adjudication Panel in the Household Air Pollution Intervention Network (HAPIN) Trial.

Lung ultrasound (LUS) is an alternative to chest radiography to confirm a diagnosis of pneumonia. For research and disease surveillance, methods to use LUS to diagnose pneumonia are needed. In the Household Air Pollution Intervention Network (HAPIN) trial, LUS was used to confirm a clinical diagnosis of severe pneumonia in infants. We developed a standardized definition of pneumonia, protocols for recruitment and training of sonographers, along with LUS image acquisition and interpretation. We use a blinded panel approach to interpretation with LUS cine-loops randomized to non-scanning sonographers with expert review. We obtained 357 lung ultrasound scans: 159, 8 and 190 scans were collected in Guatemala, Peru and Rwanda, respectively. The diagnosis of primary endpoint pneumonia (PEP) required an expert tie breaker in 181 scans (39%). PEP was diagnosed in 141 scans (40%), not diagnosed in 213 (60%), with 3 scans (<1%) deemed uninterpretable. Agreement among the two blinded sonographers and the expert reader in Guatemala, Peru and Rwanda was 65%, 62% and 67%, with a prevalence-and-bias-corrected kappa of 0.30, 0.24 and 0.33, respectively. Use of standardized imaging protocols, training and an adjudication panel resulted in high confidence for the diagnosis of pneumonia using LUS. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]