Lung Ultrasound in the COVID-19 Pandemic

Cianci, Vito; Zanatta, Mirko

Lung ultrasound (LUS) is one of the most important and innovative applications in emergency and critical care medicine for the management of critically ill patients. Ultrasound has been widely used in the COVID-19 pandemic as an extremely reliable technique and has proved to have a key role in the diagnosis and monitoring of patients with acute respiratory failure. The diagnostic accuracy of LUS is higher than chest X-ray and similar to computed tomography, which is considered the gold standard. COVID-19 pneumonia has some distinctive ultrasonographic signs but not pathognomonic, and LUS significantly improves the management of COVID-19 patients speeding up the diagnostic path. The examination is bedside; reduces the risk of contamination, avoiding mobilization of the patients; cuts down the amount of radioactive exposure; and gives real-time answers to many diagnostic and therapeutic doubts. Finally, the instruments are small and the scanner and the probes can be protected from contamination easily.