Use of digital auscultation to improve diagnosis of paediatric pneumonia

Integrated Community Case Management (iCCM) is a World Health Organization (WHO) approach in which community health workers deliver basic healthcare services in the community setting, including childhood pneumonia treatment.

The WHO pneumonia guidelines are sensitive but non-specific, in order to ensure that children with possible pneumonia receive antibiotic treatment. As a result, while the guidelines miss few children with pneumonia (high sensitivity), many children who do not have pneumonia incorrectly receive antibiotics (low specificity), resulting in antibiotic overuse.

The WHO guidelines do not include lung auscultation (listening to lung sounds) in their pneumonia definition for frontline healthcare workers, likely due to its high inter-observer variability, regardless of healthcare providers’ training level. Digital auscultation by electronic stethoscopes may help to overcome these limitations. Inclusion of lung auscultation in the current algorithm could enhance the specificity of the guidelines.

This study aims to improve the diagnostic accuracy of child pneumonia by using automated lung sound classification through digital auscultation.

The embedded PhD will use the study data to (i) assess the consistency of lung sounds recorded by primary health care workers from under-five children using a digital stethoscope against pre-defined quality thresholds and (ii) determine the reliability and performance of the interpretations of recorded lung sounds by the Smartscope analysis system compared to reference interpretations by a paediatric listening panel.

For further information, see associated media

https://www.ed.ac.uk/usher/respire/phd-studentships/salahuddin-ahmed