What's your Medical Diagnosis? Newborn with respiratory failure

The Isabel diagnosis tool touts an extensive database of conditions for differential diagnosis support, and we often will test its accuracy with real patient cases from the New England Journal of Medicine.

About the Isabel Diagnosis Challenge

The New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) publishes interesting presentations of common diseases and unusual cases in the Clinical pathology Conference (CPC) series. These cases are educational and can pose diagnostic challenges even to the expert physicians at the Massachusetts General Hospital.

Using the clinical features of these cases you can evaluate your own diagnostic skills and compare your diagnostic performance to that of the physicians at MGH. If you are registered with Isabel as a client or have a free-trial subscription, you can use the diagnosis reminder system and run through some scenarios to get a list of likely suspects. Clicking on a diagnosis will take you through to various knowledge sources and links available from within Isabel.

Today's Case

NEJM 12:19 --  Premature newborn boy with respiratory failure.

Demographic: Male, neonate, North America
Clinical features:

• respiratory distress
• respiratory acidosis
• skin mottling
• irritability
• lethargy
• fever
• cardiomegaly

STOP! Before you read further, create your own differential diagnosis.

Final Diagnosis of the case according to NEJM and Isabel: Neonatal herpes simplex virus infection, involving the lungs, liver and adrenal glands, with sepsis

Was the final diagnosis given by the Isabel system: Yes, Neonatal herpes simplex virus infection under Herpes simplex virus