A globally available COVID-19 - Template for clinical imaging studies

Gabriel Alexander Salg; Maria Katharina Ganten; Matthias Baumhauer; Claus Peter Heussel; Jens Kleesiek

Until now, the results are available earliest the next day. Meanwhile, the patient has to be treated as 70 potentially COVID-19 positive, requiring costly isolation for safety of staff and eventually cohort 71 isolation with a risk to get infected therein. While this method detects the virus, it does not provide 72 quantitative data on the extent or stage of the disease. Fang et al. claimed that the sensitivity of rt-73 PCR at +3/-3 days after the appearance of external symptoms is only 71%. 6 The study also found that 74 in 98% of patients at the same stage, abnormalities that are characteristic of viral pneumonia are 75 visible in computed tomography (CT) of the lungs. 6 The correlation of COVID-19 infection with features 76 in chest CT has been confirmed by other studies. 7 A sensitivity of 91.9% for a combination of a chest 77 CT and rt-PCR test, compared to 78.2% for a single rt-PCR alone or 86.2% for two subsequent rt-PCR 78 tests was found. 7 Researchers from China and the Netherlands examined data from 1,014 patients and 79 concluded that CT imaging has high sensitivity for diagnosis of COVID-19 and furthermore offers the show preference for middle-aged to elderly individuals with comorbidities, 11 the imaging information 91 could be combined with other patient characteristics to predict the prognosis of patients, so as to 92 identify those requiring intensive medical care. 12,13 Early stages of COVID-19 pneumonias mainly 93 involve pure GGOs evolving to multiple GGOs with consolidations in lesions and crazy-paving pattern 94 in a progressive stage. 14,15 This disease monitoring by chest CT imaging has already been used in studies 95 to determine treatment regimens of patients. 11 We conjecture that the aggregation of radiomics 96 features in correlation with rt-PCR, patient history, clinical and radiological findings, systematically 97 All rights reserved. No reuse allowed without permission. the author/funder, who has granted medRxiv a license to display the preprint in perpetuity.