Evaluation of Lung UltraSound In Acute Heart Failure (ELUSIA)

Acute heart failure is a life threatening condition requiring rapid diagnosis and treatment. However, the differentiation between heart failure and other conditions presenting with acute dyspnea is notoriously difficult in the emergency room. Point-of-care lung ultrasound is a simple, rapid and noninvasive technique directly visualizing fluid content in the lung as evidence for acute heart failure. A number of publications showed the diagnostic utility of lung ultrasound in the diagnosis of heart failure, but many open questions remain.

The goal of this study is to evaluate the diagnostic accuracy of lung ultrasound to predict a cardiac origin of dyspnea in unselected patients in the emergency room as compared to standard evaluation. Further goals are to evaluate if lung ultrasound provides additional diagnostic information as compared to clinical examination, NT-proBNP and chest X-ray, to compare the diagnostic accuracy of lung ultrasound in different patient subgroups (heart failure with preserved vs reduced ejection fraction, de novo vs decompensated chronic heart failure, age ≥75 vs <75 years, women vs men and presence vs absence of concomitant pulmonary disease) and to compare demographics and clinical characteristics in different patient populations.

300 patients, aged ≥18 years presenting to the emergency room (ER) with acute dyspnoe as principal complaint will undergo initial clinical assessment of the likely etiology of dyspnea by the ER physician in charge. The second assessment by the same physician will include results of NT-proBNP according to predefined cutoffs. Final diagnosis ("Gold Standard") will be done by two experienced investigators after patient discharge taking into account the complete medical record except the results of lung ultrasound. Assessment of chest X-ray and lung ultrasound by investigators will be preforemd blinded regarding all other results.