Correlation between Chest CT Findings and Clinical Features of 211 COVID-19 Suspected Patients in Wuhan, China

Song, Songlin; Wu, Feihong; Liu, Yiming; Jiang, Hongwei; Xiong, Fu; Guo, Xiaopeng; Zhang, Hongsen; Yang, Fan; Zheng, Chuansheng

BACKGROUND: Chest CT has been widely used to assess the pulmonary involvement in COVID-19. We aimed to investigate the correlation between chest CT and clinical features in COVID-19 suspected patients with or without fever. METHODS: We retrospectively enrolled 211 COVID-19 suspected patients who underwent both chest CT and RT-PCR in Wuhan, China. The performance of CT in patients having relevant onset symptoms with fever (n=141) and without fever (n=70) were assessed respectively. RESULTS: The sensitivity of CT for COVID-19 was 97.3% with AUC of 0.71 (95% CI 0.66-0.76). There were 141 suspected patients with fever and 70 without fever. In fever group, four variables were screened to establish the basic model: age, monocyte, red blood cell, and hypertension. The AUC of basic model was 0.72 (95% CI 0.63-0.81) while CT-aided model was 0.77 (95% CI 0.68-0.85), with significantly difference (P＜0.05). In non-fever group, only dry cough was screened out to establish the basic model, AUC was 0.76 (95% CI 0.64-0.88), which made no significantly difference than CT-aided model (P=0.08). CONCLUSIONS: Chest CT has a high sensitivity on COVID-19, and it can improve the diagnostic accuracy for COVID-19 suspected patients with fever in initial screen, while its value for non-fever patients remains questionable.