Streamlined Point-of-Care Ultrasound Examination for Pulmonary Tuberculosis

A fixed 6-zone lung POCUS protocol discriminated pulmonary tuberculosis from TB-negative participants in Ugandan patients with AUC 0.82 (95% CI 0.73–0.92).

• Why it matters: POCUS can triage TB without radiation, but TB-specific acquisition protocols are not standardized, limiting scalable use in high-burden settings.
• What they did: In a Ugandan cohort (318 analyzed; 118 pulmonary TB, 200 TB-negative including 102 other respiratory conditions), an 18-position symmetric protocol was evaluated and Random Forest models tested all 2-, 4-, and 6-zone combinations using a fixed 75/25 training/holdout split.
• The result: The 6-zone protocol matched 12-zone and 18-position performance for TB versus all TB-negative (AUC 0.81 for both) and for TB versus other respiratory conditions (AUC 0.81 vs 0.85), enabling a simpler scalable triage approach.

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