We are grateful to Barry Kelly, Department of Radiology, Royal Victoria Hospital for assistance with developing this scoring system. We have used it to score chest Xray findings in studies on sputum retention post thoracic surgery. Each lung is scored separately.

Score    Description

0                Normal

1                Linear atelectasis

    1.25        a: one third of hemidiaphragm

    1.50        b: two thirds of hemidiaphragm

    1.75        c: all of one hemidiaphragm

2                Lobar consolidation

3                Lobar collapse

4                Bronchial consolidation (whole lung, bronchopneumonia etc)