Time Course of Chest CT Lung Changes in COVID-19 Patients from Onset to Recovery

Document Type : Original Article

Authors

The Departments of Diagnostic & Intervention Radiology* and Chest & Internal Medicine**, Faculty of Medicine, Cairo University

Abstract

Abstract Background: The chest computed tomography (CT) has an important complementary role in diagnosis of COVID-19 disease. Computed tomography (CT) is widely used to eval-uate the severity of COVID-19 infection and track disease progression. Aim of Study: The aim of the study was to determine the changes in chest CT findings associated with COVID-19 pneumonia from initial diagnosis until patient recovery and clarifying the end result of chest affection in the following-up groups and evaluating the percentage of residual or fibrosis after viral cure. Patients and Methods: It has been a long time since human kind has experienced a global pandemic. Nowadays in 2019, human kind is again to survive another worldwide spreading disease COVID-19. This SARS-COV-2 virus first appeared as a strange sort of respiratory tract infection with the first reported patient in Wuhan, China on December 2019. The new coronavirus disease has spread to every country around the world, forcing people to change their lives in new difficult ways. Results: This cross-sectional study was conducted on 110 patients of proven cases of Covid-19 under follow-up with serial CT chest scan. From onset to first scan show that 98 (89.1%) were slow, 10(9.1%) were rapid and 2(1.8%) were abrupt. From onset to discharge the study shows that 101 patients (91.8%) had a slow disease progression, 7 patients (6.4%) had a rapid progression and 2 patients (1.8%) had an abrupt course of disease. From onset to hospitalization, the study shows that 3 patients (2.7%) were hospitalized. Conclusions: Our findings suggest that periodic chest CT scans in COVID-19 patients (at least in a five-day interval during the first 13-15 days) are necessary and may provide useful information to guide clinical practice, especially allow-ing for more tailored therapies and holistic care models.

Keywords