Ground-glass opacity is a very frequent and unspecified finding in chest computed tomography. Therefore, it admits a wide range of differential diagnoses in the acute context, from viral pneumonias such as influenza virus, coronavirus disease 2019 and cytomegalovirus and even non-infectious lesions, such as vaping, pulmonary infarction, alveolar hemorrhage and pulmonary edema. For this diagnostic differentiation, ground glass must be correlated with other findings in imaging tests, with laboratory tests and with the patients' clinical condition.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFJ Thorac Imaging
January 2021
Background: An expert consensus recently proposed a standardized coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) reporting language for computed tomography (CT) findings of COVID-19 pneumonia.
Purpose: The purpose of the study was to evaluate the performance of CT in differentiating COVID-19 from other viral infections using a standardized reporting classification.
Methods: A total of 175 consecutive patients were retrospectively identified from a single tertiary-care medical center from March 15 to March 24, 2020, including 87 with positive reverse transcription-polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR) test for COVID-19 and 88 with negative COVID-19 RT-PCR test, but positive respiratory pathogen panel.
The disease caused by the new coronavirus, or COVID-19, has been recently described and became a health issue worldwide. Its diagnosis of certainty is given by polymerase chain reaction. High-resolution computed tomography, however, is useful in the current context of pandemic, especially for the most severe cases, in assessing disease extent, possible differential diagnoses and searching complications.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe disease caused by the new coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2), designated COVID-19, emerged in late 2019 in China, in the city of Wuhan (Hubei province), and showed exponential growth in that country. It subsequently spread to all continents, and infection with SARS-CoV-2 is now classified as a pandemic. Given the magnitude achieved, scientific interest in COVID-19 has also grown in the international literature, including its manifestations on imaging studies, particularly on CT.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFCoronary computed tomography angiography (coronary CTA) is a powerful non-invasive imaging method to evaluate coronary artery disease. Nowadays, coronary CTA estimated effective radiation dose can be dramatically reduced using state-of-the-art scanners, such as 320-row detector CT (320-CT), without changing coronary CTA diagnostic accuracy. To optimize and further reduce the radiation dose, new iterative reconstruction algorithms were released recently by several CT manufacturers, and now they are used routinely in coronary CTA.
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