Correlation of Chest Radiography with Microbiological Findings for the Diagnosis of Pulmonary Tuberculosis

Introduction: Tuberculosis is a major health problem faced by mankind since ancient times till date in spite of advances in our knowledge. Recently HIV hastened this & it became the single largest infectious diseasecausing high mortality in humans leading to numerous deaths annually. Early & prompt diagnosis is the only solution to control it. In developing country like India RNTCP depends on chest radiography & smear microscopy but culture is still GOLD standard method. Thus this study was designed to correlate the radiologically suspected tuberculosis cases with Zeihl-Neelsen staining & culture on LJ medium. Method: A cross-sectional study conducted on 60 radiologically suspected cases of pulmonary tuberculosis to compare the efficacy with conventional LJ medium culture and ZN staining. The samples were chosen using simple random sampling method. Results: Out of total 60 cases, 40(66.66%) cases showed positive results by any of the method. ZN staining (100%) rendered highest positivity than LJ media (80%) in far advanced with cavity while in minimal lesion LJ media (25%)was more effective than ZN staining (12.5%). Maximum number of Grading 3+ cases were with far advanced with cavity (100%) followed by moderate lesion with cavity (72.7%). Advanced with cavity showed highest and earliest growth i.e. 60% within 2 weeks while in moderate lesion with cavity it was 18.8% Conclusion: Correlation between radiological and microbiological findings must be the mainstay for the diagnosis in clinical suspected case of pulmonary TB.