Automatized lung disease quantification in patients with COVID-19 as a predictive tool to assess hospitalization severity.

The pandemic of COVID-19 led to a dramatic situation in hospitals, where staff had to deal with a huge number of patients in respiratory distress. To alleviate the workload of radiologists, we implemented an artificial intelligence (AI) - based analysis named CACOVID-CT, to automatically assess disease severity on chest CT scans obtained from those patients. We retrospectively studied CT scans obtained from 476 patients admitted at the University Hospital of Liege with a COVID-19 disease. We quantified the percentage of COVID-19 affected lung area (% AA) and the CT severity score (total CT-SS). These quantitative measurements were used to investigate the overall prognosis and patient outcome: hospital length of stay (LOS), ICU admission, ICU LOS, mechanical ventilation, and in-hospital death. Both CT-SS and % AA were highly correlated with the hospital LOS, the risk of ICU admission, the risk of mechanical ventilation and the risk of in-hospital death. Thus, CAD4COVID-CT analysis proved to be a useful tool in detecting patients with higher hospitalization severity risk. It will help for management of the patients flow. The software measured the extent of lung damage with great efficiency, thus relieving the workload of radiologists.

Clinical course and challenging management of early COVID-19 infection after heart transplantation: case report of two patients.

BACKGROUND: There are limited data on Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) in solid organ transplant patients, especially in heart transplant recipients, with only a few case reports and case series described so far. Heart transplant recipients may be at particular high risk due to their comorbidities and immunosuppressed state. CASE PRESENTATION: This report describes the clinical course and the challenging management of early COVID-19 infection in two heart transplant recipients who tested positive for the SARS-CoV-2 virus in the perioperative period of the transplant procedure. The two patients developed a severe form of the disease and ultimately died despite the initiation of an antiviral monotherapy with hydroxychloroquine coupled with the interruption of mycophenolate mofetil. CONCLUSIONS: These two cases illustrate the severity and poor prognosis of COVID-19 in the perioperative period of a heart transplant. Thorough screening of donors and recipients is mandatory, and the issue of asymptomatic carriers needs to be addressed.