Test Characteristics of Emergency Medicine-Performed Point-of-Care Ultrasound for the Diagnosis of Acute Cholecystitis: A Systematic Review and Meta-analysis

Acute cholecystitis accounts for up to 9% of hospital admissions for acute abdominal pain, and best practice entails early surgical management. Ultrasound is the standard modality used to confirm diagnosis. Our objective was to perform a systematic review and meta-analysis to determine the diagnostic accuracy of emergency physician-performed point-of-care ultrasound for the diagnosis of acute cholecystitis when compared with a reference standard of final diagnosis (informed by available surgical pathology, discharge diagnosis, and radiology-performed ultrasound). We completed a systematic review and meta-analysis, registered in PROSPERO, in adherence to Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses guidelines. We searched 7 databases as well as gray literature in the form of select conference abstracts from inception to February 8, 2023. Two independent reviewers completed study selection, data extraction, and risk of bias (QUADAS-2) assessment. Disagreements were resolved by consensus with a third reviewer. Data were extracted from eligible studies to create 2 × 2 tables for diagnostic accuracy meta-analysis. Hierarchical Summary Receiver Operating Characteristic models were constructed. Of 1855 titles/abstracts, 40 were selected for full-text review. Ten studies (n=2356) were included. Emergency physician-performed point-of-care ultrasound with final diagnosis as the reference standard (7 studies, n=1,772) had a pooled sensitivity of 70.9% (95% confidence interval [CI] 62.3 to 78.2), specificity of 94.4% (95% CI 88.2 to 97.5), positive likelihood ratio of 12.7 (5.8 to 27.5), and negative likelihood ratio of 0.31 (0.23 to 0.41) for the diagnosis of acute cholecystitis. Emergency physician-performed point-of-care ultrasound has high specificity and moderate sensitivity for the diagnosis of acute cholecystitis in patients with clinical suspicion. This review supports the use of emergency physician-performed point-of-care ultrasound to rule in a diagnosis of acute cholecystitis in the emergency department, which may help expedite definitive management.