Introduction: Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) first emerged in China and rapidly spread in the world causing a pandemic. The pandemic of COVID-19 has caused a major global crisis and continues to put tremendous stress on health-care systems worldwide. It is essential to detect the disease at an early stage to isolate infected persons from the healthy population and give them appropriate treatment. Because most patients infected with COVID-19 had characteristic CT imaging patterns, radiologic examinations have become vital in early diagnosis of disease course. For standardization, Dutch Radiological Society developed CO-RADS criteria.
Aim: to describe the spectrum CT findings in COVID-19 and to validate CORADS system, using the RT-PCR for COVID 19 as gold standard.
Methods: A group of 195 patients proved to have COVID-19 infection (by positive RT-PCR) and underwent CT chest studies were recruited excluding patients who had negative RT-PCR test or whom CT chest exams were technically insufficient. CT images were reviewed for: presence of lesions, types of lesions, and distribution of lesions. The CORADS score were assigned for each case. Then the classification of the lesions and CORADS score were compared to the RT-PCR test results.
Results: Lesions were present in 166 patients while 29 patients had normal CT chest. Median CO-RADS score was 5. Compared to PCR, CO-RADS sensitivity was 72.7%, with a false-negative rate of 27.3%.
Conclusion: CORADS system is no so sensitive and we cannot depend on it alone to exclude the possibility of COVID-19 infection.