The role of lung ultrasound B-lines and serum KL-6 in the screening and follow-up of rheumatoid arthritis patients for an identification of interstitial lung disease: review of the literature, proposal for a preliminary algorithm, and clinical application to cases

Table 1 Overview of included studies

Author	Number of patients	Aim of study	Comparison with other diagnostic modality	Feasibility	Cutoff value of B-line number	Sensitivity (%)	Specificity (%)	NPV (%)	PPV (%)	AUC (%)
Moazedi-Fuerst et al. [55]	64 RA patients	To screen subclinical RA-ILD	HRCT	N/A	N/A	97.1	97.3	98.6	94.3	N/A
Barskova et al. [56]	58 SSc patients, including 32 VEDOSS	To screen early SSc-ILD	HRCT	100%	> 5 ≥20	100 83	55 96	100 N/A	78 N/A	94 N/A
Gutiérrez et al. [57]	133 SSc patients	To detect and predict asymptomatic SSc-ILD	HRCT	N/A	N/A	91.2%	88.6%	N/A	N/A	N/A
Çakir et al. [58]	48 SSc patients	To evaluate the severity of SSc-ILD	HRCT	N/A	≥6 > 24	100 79.3	84.2 94.7	100 N/A	90.6 N/A	93.7 94.8
Vizioli et al. [37]	104 suspected ILD patients	To evaluate the accuracy of LUS detection of ILD	HRCT	100%	> 5 > 10	92 92	53 66	87 90	64 71	90 N/A
Aghdashi et al. [59]	31 suspected rheumatoid lung involvement patients	To investigate the utility of LUS	HRCT	N/A	> 5	73.5	88.2	51.7	95.1	N/A

AUC, area under the curve; HRCT, high-resolution computed tomography; ILD, interstitial lung disease; LUS, lung ultrasound; N/A, not applicable; NPV, negative predictive value; PPV, positive predictive value; RA-ILD, rheumatoid arthritis–associated interstitial lung disease; SSc, systemic sclerosis; SSc-ILD, systemic sclerosis–associated interstitial lung disease; VEDOSS, very early diagnosis of systemic sclerosis

ISSN: 1478-6362