Rapid cardiothoracic ultrasound protocol for diagnosis of acute heart failure in the emergency department.

Objectives: The aim of this study was to evaluate the performance of a rapid cardiothoracic ultrasound protocol (CaTUS), combining echocardiographically derived E/e' and lung ultrasound (LUS), for diagnosing acute heart failure (AHF) in patients with undifferentiated dyspnea in an emergency department (ED). Patients and results: We enrolled 100 patients with undifferentiated dyspnea from a tertiary care ED, who all had CaTUS done immediately upon arrival in the ED. CaTUS was positive for AHF with an E/e' > 15 and congestion, that is bilateral B-lines or bilateral pleural fluid, on LUS. In addition, an inferior vena cava index was also recorded to analyze whether including a central venous pressure estimate would add diagnostic benefit to the CaTUS protocol. All 100 patients had a brain natriuretic peptide (BNP) sample withdrawn, and 96 patients underwent chest radiography in the ED, which was analyzed later by a blinded radiologist. The reference diagnosis of AHF consisted of either a BNP of more than 400 ng/l or a BNP of less than 100 ng/l in combination with congestion on chest radiography and structural heart disease on conventional echocardiography. CaTUS had a sensitivity of 100% (95% confidence interval: 91.4-100%), a specificity of 95.8% (95% confidence interval: 84.6-99.3%), and an area under the curve of 0.979 for diagnosing AHF (P

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