الفهرس 
INTRODUCTIONOnly 14 pages are availabe for public view
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Abstract
Pneumonia is a common and potentially life-threatening disease, which is associated with increasing morbidity, mortality, hospitalization rate and health care costs. In the United States in 2009, more than 54,000 deaths in the United States were attributed to pneumonia.
Because of both the clinical and the financial burden of CAP, efficient and cost-effective diagnostic options for pneumonia should be considered.
The clinical diagnosis of pneumonia based on symptoms (chest pain, cough, fever and dyspnea) and signs (fever, tachycardia, and abnormal breath sounds) was unreliable compared to the combination of radiological image and clinical features.
The chest X-ray (CXR) is still remained the corner stone and the first imaging step for diagnosing pneumonia.
CT chest remained the gold standard for diagnosing of pneumonia but may not always be available, expansive and had high dose of radiation.
Ultrasound examination is increasingly being used as a valuable bedside method in the diagnosis of various thoracic conditions including pleural or pericardial effusion, empyema, pneumothorax, pulmonary embolism and pneumonia. It have a lot of advantage over other radiological techniques such as it’s rapid, accurate, non invasive, non expensive and without risk of radiation, it can be used in both stable and unstable patients and during pregnancy, it does not require too much time to prepare, it may also performed parallel to physical examination and resuscitation.
The key to ultrasound visualization of pneumonia is relative loss of aeration of a portion of the lung and a concomitant increase in the fluid content, which is seen as lung consolidation. Once this consolidation reaches the pleura, it can be seen with ultrasound. Consolidation and dynamic air bronchograms have the highest specificity for pneumonia.
The primary objective of this study was to determine the accuracy of LUS in diagnosing pneumonia compared with chest radiograph as the most common initial chest imaging and CT chest as the gold standard with exclusion of pregnant females to avoid the effects of high dose of radiation.
The study was carried on 30 adult patients of both sex, there were ninety19 male patients forming about 63.3% and eleven11 female patients forming about 36.7%, who were admitted to Chest Diseases Department at Alexandria Main University Hospital with suggested manifestations of pneumonia along a period of six months from the march 2015 to September 2015. The study was approved by the Medical Ethics Committee of Alexandria Faculty of Medicine.
All patients included in the study were subjected to complete history taking, complete physical examination, laboratory investigation and imaging by chest X-ray, CT chest and lung ultrasound.