Chest Computed Tomography for the Diagnosis of Patients with Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19): A Rapid Review and Meta-Analysis

Meng Lv; Mengshu Wang; Nan Yang; Xufei Luo; Wei Li; Xin Chen; Yunlan Liu; Mengjuan Ren; Xianzhuo Zhang; Ling Wang; Yanfang Ma; Junqiang Lei; Toshio Fukuoka; Hyeong Sik Ahn; Myeong Soo Lee; Zhengxiu Luo; Yaolong Chen; Enmei Liu; Jinhui Tian; Xiaohui Wang

COVID-19 is mainly diagnosed by viral nucleic acid test, immunological detection, and radiological examination. However, the sensitivity of the nucleic acid test may be as low as 50% (7) , and some diagnoses may be missed. As a respiratory disease, imaging detection plays an important role in the diagnosis of COVID-19. On one hand, when COVID-19 cannot be diagnosed by nucleic acid, CT can be used as an auxiliary diagnostic method; on the other hand, CT can show lesions and also plays an important role in patient follow-up. Since February 2020, several case-control studies (8, 9) , case series (10, 11) , and case-report (12, 13) of CT diagnosis of COVID-19 have been published. However, there is no systematic review and meta-analysis to find out the performance of chest CT in the diagnosis of COVID-19. We therefore conducted this study to estimate the sensitivity of chest CT and the probability of imaging findings in cases with COVID-19 to guide the diagnosis of COVID-19.