Researchers develop more efficient tool to diagnose pneumonia

The University of Oxford announced Tuesday that its researchers had developed a much easier and cheaper tool to diagnose pneumonia.

For the time being, correctly diagnosing pneumonia and understanding how severe it is requires specialist doctors and expensive equipment like X-ray machines. Neither is available to community health workers in developing nations, where 99 percent of the annual 1.1 million childhood pneumonia deaths happen.

Accurate diagnosis can cut death rates by 42 percent but involves more than just correctly identifying if a child has pneumonia, according to the study published in the Journal of the Royal Society Interface.

For an automated system to be effective, it needs to be able to work with data from that basic equipment, so the Oxford team took the in-depth data from a clinical study in Gambia and used machine learning techniques to see whether they could develop an algorithm that could diagnose pneumonia.

"For identifying pneumonia we found four features that can be measured with two pieces of equipment. Heart rate, respiratory rate and oxygen saturation can all be measured using a pulse oximeter. Temperature requires a thermometer. These are things that can be made available to a health worker with basic training," said Elina Naydenova, one of the authors of the study from Oxford University.

Using these four measures, the team achieved 98.2 percent sensitivity and 97.5 percent specificity, which means they could correctly identify 982 out of every 1,000 pneumonia cases and only falsely identified pneumonia in 25 of every 1,000 people without the disease.

"We have identified a set of features that could offer an alternative to the combination of X-rays and blood cultures only available in a well-equipped hospital. These will be used in a mobile application linked to a low-cost diagnostic equipment, which we will be trialing in the next couple of years," said Naydenova. Endite