Association Between CT Scan Findings and Mortality in Covid-19 Cases

Abstract

Background: Covid-19 epidemia is a worldwide infectious viral disease initiating from December 2019from Wuhan, China. Recognition of the prognostic role of imaging findings is important to improve theoutcomes in patients. Accordingly, regarding the lack of studies in this era among Iranian patients, this studywas done to determine the association between CT scan findings and mortality in Covid-19 cases.Methods: In this prognostic prospective cohort study, 192 consecutive patients with established Covid-19disease by clinical findings, and laboratory results in Besat Hospital, Tehran, Iran in March and April 2020were enrolled. The findings in CT scan were involved zone and lobe, ground glass, consolidation, groundglass with reticular, reverse hallo sign, microvascular dilation sign, fibrotic streaks, sub pleural line, airbronchogram, Bronchus distortion, broncheiectasis, pleural thickening, pleural reaction, and pleural effusion.According to involvement degree the points in CT scan were 0, 1, and 2 for lack of lung parenchymainvolvement, less than 50 percent involvement, and more than 50 percent involvement.Results: The involved zones were significantly differed between survived and dead cases (P=0.001). Asshown in Table 4, the scores of CT scan for lung involvement and also number of involved lobes werediffered across the alive and dead cases (P=0.001) the mean hospital stay was 7.1 (5.6) and 5.7 (2.5) days thatwas same across the groups (P=0.325). There were significant differences between groups for consolidation,ground glass plus reticular pattern, fibrotic streaks, sub-pleural line, air bronchogram, bronchiectasis, pleuralthickening, pleural effusion, and pleural reaction (P < 0.05).Conclusion: Totally, according to the obtained results it may be concluded that CT scan is useful prognosticmodality to predict the mortality among patients with Covid-19 disease. Consolidation, ground glass plusreticular pattern, fibrotic streaks, sub-pleural line, air bronchogram, bronchiectasis, pleural thickening,pleural effusion, and pleural reaction are the man CT scan findings predicting higher mortality rate in thesepatients.