The Univeristy of Melbourne The Royal Melbourne Hopspital

A joint venture between The University of Melbourne and The Royal Melbourne Hospital

News

29 Aug 2016

Can ultrasound improve pneumonia diagnosis in children?

Final year University of Melbourne medical student, Claire Lissaman has been presented first prize for her outstanding 3 Minute Thesis (3MT) presentation on her study investigating whether ultrasound can be used to diagnose pneumonia in children.

The 3MT competition was started by the University of Queensland and is now run all over the world. The aim is to condense research into three minutes and present it to a non-specialist audience.

The prize, sponsored by the Doherty Institute was presented to Claire following her 3MT at the recent MD Conference.

"Pneumonia in children is very common with more than 10,000 Australian children hospitalised each year, worldwide it is the single greatest killer of children under five,” Claire said.

“Even though it is common, it’s surprisingly hard to diagnose accurately. To avoid over-using antibiotics, many doctors will order a chest X-ray to confirm the diagnosis. But chest X-rays are problematic too – it is not always obvious whether they show pneumonia and they involve exposure to potentially unnecessary radiation.”

Studies in children and adults overseas suggest that ultrasound of the lungs might be as good as chest X-ray at identifying pneumonia and it has the added advantage of being at the patient’s bedside and not exposing the child to radiation.

“We wanted to check whether these results also applied in an Australian setting so we performed a lung ultrasound on 100 children in the emergency department at the Royal Children’s Hospital who had chest X-ray ordered by their treating doctor to look for pneumonia. We then compared our results with the X-ray to see whether the ultrasound had similar findings,” Claire explained.

Results so far suggest that lung ultrasound is good at identifying pneumonia in children who have it, but it sometimes also identifies other problems in the lungs that are not pneumonia, like viral respiratory infections.

“When finished, we hope that our study will show lung ultrasound could be useful for diagnosing pneumonia in children in the emergency department and we may be able to suggest situations when a chest X-ray is not necessary. We will also identify areas where future research may be needed before ultrasound is used in practice,” Claire concluded.

“I would like to thank my supervisor and principal researcher Dr Adam O'Brien, fellow sonographer Dr Panida Kanjanauptom, radiologist Dr Cyril Ong and emergency department physician Dr Elliot Long for their guidance, encouragement and hard work on this project; all of the staff in the emergency department at the Royal Children's Hospital and of course the families and patients who were involved.”