Robust and Reproducible Quantification of the Extent of Chest Radiographic Abnormalities (And It's Free!).

Abstract

RATIONALE:

Objective, reproducible quantification of the extent of abnormalities seen on a chest radiograph would improve the user-friendliness of a previously proposed severity scoring system for pulmonary tuberculosis and could be helpful in monitoring response to therapy, including in clinical trials.

METHODS:

In this study we report the development and evaluation of a simple tool using free image editing software (GIMP) to accurately and reproducibly quantify the area of affected lung on the chest radiograph of tuberculosis patients. As part of a pharmacokinetic study in Lima, Peru, a chest radiograph was performed on patients with pulmonary tuberculosis and this was subsequently photographed using a digital camera. The GIMP software was used by two independent and trained readers to estimate the extent of affected lung (expressed as a percentage of total lung area) in each radiograph and the resulting radiographic SCORE.

RESULTS:

56 chest radiographs were included in the reading analysis. The Intraclass correlation coefficient (ICC) between the 2 observers was 0.977 (p<0.001) for the area of lung affected and was 0.955 (p<0.001) for the final score; and the kappa coefficient of Interobserver agreement for both the area of lung affected and the score were 0.9 (p<0.001) and 0.86 (p<0.001) respectively.

CONCLUSIONS:

This high level of between-observer agreement suggests that this freely available software could constitute a simple and useful tool for robust evaluation of individual and serial chest radiographs.

• Authors: Ana Requena-Méndez, Edelweiss Aldasoro, Jose Muñoz, David A J Moore
• Journal: PloS one (PLoS One) Vol. 10 Issue 5 Pg. e0128044 ( 2015) ISSN: 1932-6203 [Electronic] United States
• PMID: 25996917 (Publication Type: Journal Article, Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't)

Topics

• Humans
• Image Processing, Computer-Assisted (methods)
• Lung (diagnostic imaging, pathology)
• Radiography, Thoracic (methods, standards)
• Reproducibility of Results
• Thorax (pathology)
• Tuberculosis, Pulmonary (diagnostic imaging, drug therapy, pathology)