Laboratory and instrumental diagnostics of viral pneumonia (review)

The review analyzes the published data on laboratory and instrumental diagnostics of viral pneumonia. To search for articles, we used the PubMed database and eLIBRARY RU, as well as archives of the journals "Clinical Microbiology and antimicrobial chemotherapy", "Pulmonology", "Medical education today", "Complex problems of cardiovascular diseases", "Archives of internal medicine", "Kremlin medicine. Clinical Bulletin" and others. The literature review uses 44 sources of literature, articles published in the period from 2004 to 2020. Recently, in connection with the coronavirus infection (SARS-CoV-2) pandemic, differential diagnosis and treatment of viral pneumonia has become a rather urgent problem in medicine. Currently, new diagnostic methods are being developed and existing ones are being improved. Despite the variety of methods developed, the leading one is the polymerase chain reaction (PCR) which has been researched to have disadvantages. They include high cost of equipment, technical training of personnel, obtaining false negative results, and the complexity of research.