Primary ciliary dyskinesia (PCD) is a rare inherited ciliopathy in which respiratory cilia are stationary or dyskinetic. The clinical presentation of PCD is highly non-specific since it includes infections and disorders of the upper (otitis and rhinosinusitis) and lower (neonatal respiratory distress, bronchitis, pneumonia and bronchiectasis) airways, starting in early life. Clinical examination alone does not allow a PCD diagnosis, which relies on several concordant tests, since none are sensitive or specific enough alone. Despite being the most sensitive and specific test to diagnose PCD, digital high-speed videomicroscopy (DHSV) is not sufficiently standardized, preventing its use with complete confidence as a confirmatory diagnostic test for PCD, or its inclusion in a diagnostic algorithm. Since the 2017 ERS recommendations for PCD diagnosis, three main issues remain to be solved in order to optimize DHSV ciliary beating evaluation: the problem in defining an accurate sensitivity and specificity as there is no gold standard method to diagnose all PCD cases, a lack of standardization in the operating procedure for processing respiratory samples, and in the choice of measured parameters (self-operating or not). The development of new automated analysis approaches is promising and will require full clinical validation.
Keywords: ciliary beat frequency (CBF); ciliary beat pattern (CBP); diagnostic; digital high-speed videomicroscopy (DHSV); primary ciliary dyskinesia (PCD); standardization.