Low-Cost Non-imaging Ultrasound (LoCoNiUS) for Pneumonia Detection in Resource-constrained Settings

Pneumonia is the world’s leading cause of child mortality, causing 1.4 million deaths per year in children under five. Pneumonia is usually diagnosed based on x-ray images and laboratory/clinical examination, requiring trained medical professionals. In poor-resource settings, however, the most stricken by pneumonia, neither this technology nor the trained health care workers are present. Innovators at Universidad Peruana Cayetano Heredia are developing a low-cost, non-imaging ultrasound device that produces an easy-to-interpret signal to find pneumonia’s infiltration of a lung and improve diagnosis. It will allow non-highly trained personnel to detect pulmonary infiltrates as a point-of-care test.