Lung Ultrasound in COVID-19 Patients

This is an international multicenter cohort study on data collected between March and April
2020. The first available lung ultrasound examination that used a 12-regions approach was
used to calculate the global LUS score.

Patients are included if they fulfilled the following criteria: 1) admitted to one of the
participating ICU; 2) for invasive ventilation; 3) for respiratory failure due to confirmed
COVID-19; and 4) having had a LUS examination performed within the first week of start of
invasive ventilation.

The primary and secondary outcomes were liberation from invasive ventilation and mortality.

Demographic, clinical and outcome variables will be presented as percentages for categorical
variables and as medians with interquartile ranges (IQR) for continuous variables.

Receiver operating characteristics (ROC) analysis will be used to derive the prognostic
discriminatory performance of global LUS score in determining succesful extubation and
mortality at day 28. The Youden index will be used to derive the optimal cut-off. The
association of global LUS with unfavourable outcomes are analyzed with Cox proportional
hazard analysis (for successful extubation and alive at day 28), logistic regression models
(mortality at day 28). Hazard ratio or odds ratio with 95% confidence intervals were
calculated for each outcome.