LUS findings
Table 3 shows main baseline (T0) LUS features of children with mild and moderate disease. Those who had moderate disease presented more B line than children with mild disease (85.7% vs 36.4% respectively; p: .03). Furthermore, in children with moderate disease, pleural irregularity and subpleural consolidations were more frequently found than in those with mild forms.
After 96 hours we had observed ultrasound abnormality al the LUS only in 20% of the children. In particular, we found a statistically significant reduction in pleural irregularities (30% vs 16.7; p: .001) and in B lines (50% vs 20%; p: .008) as showed in Table 2.
We observed a good LUS accuracy in comparison with other imaging technique (CXR/CT/MRI) to found lung abnormality (sensitivity of 90.9% and specificity of 66.6%) (Figure 2).
The inter-rater agreement was .903 with Cohen’s kappa coefficient of .80.