ULTRASOUND IN RESPIRATORY MEDICINE:
AN ITALIAN EXPERIENCE AND CURRENT AND NOVEL CLINICAL APPLICATIONS
Over the last couple of decades, thoracic ultrasound witnessed a growing attention especially in the emergency medicine/intensive care units and respiratory medicine. This is presumably due to its point-of-care ability to detect and monitor a wide spectrum of lung and pleural diseases at relatively low costs and with no ionizing radiation.
On this ground, dr. Giuseppe Francesco Sferrazza Papa\u2019s PhD program was conceived to expand current knowledge on clinical applications of ultrasound in respiratory medicine that are reported in details in the present thesis.
As a first step of the project, a two-year longitudinal study in a hospital setting and a cross-sectional survey have been conducted with the aim to examine the practical interest and application of ultrasound within the pulmonary medical Italian community. Both studies showed a widespread interest and use in Italy, a fact that provides a strong rationale to further explore the potentials of ultrasound in this field.
Subsequently, four clinical studies were performed with the aim to best examine the accuracy of ultrasound to diagnose community-acquired pneumonia in children, to clarify the clinical meaning of the ultrasound interstitial pattern, to evaluate the effects of adding ultrasound to the Wells score for suspected pulmonary embolism, and finally to check the accuracy of the technique in detecting the pathogenesis of pleuritic thoracic pain. All these studies achieved the expected targets, thus providing solid evidence that ultrasound is important in clinical practice and has a large potential that respiratory medicine has yet to exploit
