Correlation of chest CT and RT-PCR testing in coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) in Turkey

By Ş. Arslan, O. Delice, M. Kahraman, S. Yilmaz, M. Aslan. The Annals of Clinical and Analytical Medicine, 2021

923 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Aim: Chest CT plays an important role in the treatment and diagnosis of COVID-19. It is important to remember that patients with RT-PCR test positive for COVID-19 infection may have normal chest CT. Material and Methods: This study included patients who underwent RT-PCR and chest CT tests, as well as patients with suspected and confirmed COVID-19 positive cases according to the algorithm of the Institute of Science of Ministry of Health in Turkey were included in this study. The patients were divided into two groups as positive and negative according to RT-PCR results. These groups were divided into two subgroups: with CT findings compatible with COVID-19 and without them. When the RT-PCR test was taken as the gold standard, the specificity, sensitivity, PPV, NPV, and accuracy rates of chest CT were investigated in detecting COVID-19 infection. Results: RT-PCR was positive in 192 patients and negative in 418 patients. The chest CT scan was positive in 43% (82/192) of 192 patients whose RT-PCR results were positive. Chest CT scan was positive in 25% (108/418) of 418 patients whose RT-PCR results were negative. In 31% of the patients (190/610), chest CT findings were positive for COVID-19. When RT-PCR results were taken as a reference, accuracy, specificity, and sensitivity values in terms of COVID-19 infection of chest CT were 44% (95% CI, 392/610 patients), 43% (95% CI, 82/192 patients), and 74% (95% CI, 310/418 patients) respectively. Discussion: According to these data, we think that chest CT is not very successful in detecting patients infected with COVID-19, contrary to the literature. Clinicians should always be careful to identify patients with COVID-19 infection with normal thorax CT or negative RT-PCR testing.

Subfields: Infectious Diseases, Radiology, Nuclear Medicine and Imaging

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/fc60032a3f2ad65ffbdbd9088bc7059a4deb24e1

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In Infectious Diseases

In Radiology, Nuclear Medicine and Imaging

Citations in the corpus

A review of modern technologies for tackling COVID-19 pandemic (2020, background): “Speci ﬁ c abnormality in images and designs in CT scans showing COVID-19 symptoms has been discovered [17].”
Radiologist-Level COVID-19 Detection Using CT Scans with Detail-Oriented Capsule Networks (2020, methodology): “In addition, most prior publications do not make their data publicly available due to privacy and proprietary issues [14, 2, 11].”
Deep learning and medical image processing for coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic: A survey (2020, positive): “The sensitivity of a CT-based COVID-19 diagnosis is observed to be significantly 80%-90% better than RT-PCR while having 60%-70% specificity on the low side (Ai et al., 2020). (Bai et al., 2020). DL and medical image processing play an important role in differentiating between COVID-19 infected and ”
A combined deep CNN-LSTM network for the detection of novel coronavirus (COVID-19) using X-ray images (2020, neutral): “The diagnosis of coronavirus by gene sequencing for respiratory or blood samples should be confirmed as the main pointer for reverse transcription-polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR), according to the guidelines of the Chinese government [5].”
AI-Driven Tools for Coronavirus Outbreak: Need of Active Learning and Cross-Population Train/Test Models on Multitudinal/Multimodal Data (2020, background): “In the recently reported work [20], Chest CT (see Fig.”
Deep transfer learning-based automated detection of COVID-19 from lung CT scan slices (2020, positive): “Recent studies found that the sensitivity of CT for COVID-19 infection is 98% compared to RT-PCR sensitivity of 71% [46].”
Detection of COVID-19 Infection from Routine Blood Exams with Machine Learning: A Feasibility Study (2020, background): “Although chest CTs have been found associated with high sensitivity for the diagnosis of COVID-19 [1], this kind of exam can hardly be employed for screening tasks, for the radiation doses, the relative low number of devices available, and the related operation costs.”