Impact of Chest CT Screening During COVID-19 in Discovering Incidental Thoracic Lesions

Background: Corona virus disease (COVID-19) has be-come a global pandemic on March 11, 2020. SARSCoV-2 caus-es damages in multiple organs and tissues. Chest CT possesses an essential role in the diagnosis and follow-up of patients in-fected with COVID-19 pneumonia. It should also be taken into account that by doing large number of chest CT scans during the pandemic, it helped in the early diagnosis of many deadly hidden thoracic lesions. Aim of Study: This study aimed was to evaluate the inci-dental lung lesions found during routine chest CT screening during first and second waves of COVID-19 pandemic. High light the role of routine chest CT in early detection of many thoracic lesions needs surgical intervention. Patients and Methods: This retrospective cross-section-al cohort study included patients of both sex from age 18 to 70 years old with incidentally detected lung lesions on routine chest CT during the first and second waves of COVID-19 pan-demic then were surgically treated at our Department of Tho-racic Surgery. With evaluation and follow-up of previously COVID-19 positive patients preoperative and ideal time for surgical inter-vention post corona virus infection. Results: The study was applied on 110 patients and (51.82%) was asymptomatic to any complaint (48.3%) had hid-den thoracic lesion threatening life as lung, pleural cancers and emphysematous pulmonary lesions (31%, 17.3% respectively) and early diagnosis using chest CT screening during COVID-19 helped in improve outcome. And it’s also recommended pa-tients who were previously diagnosed with COVID-19 should postpone any thoracic surgical intervention for at least 6 weeks. Conclusion: Large number of Chest CT that were per-formed during pandemic had great effect in early diagnosis of life threatening thoracic lesions.