Mobile computed tomography for the efficient allocation of medical resources in patients with COVID-19 pneumonia: A case report.

RATIONALE: The highly contagious Coronavirus 2019 (COVID-19) infection raise social and economic burden. Medical staff and resources are being diverted for the care of patients with COVID-19. There are problems for healthcare systems, including burnout syndrome for the medical staff and exhaustion of medical resources. PATIENT CONCERNS: The patient was a 65-year-old woman presenting with fever, cough, and dyspnea due to COVID-19 pneumonia. She received antiviral agents, broad-spectrum antibiotics, and conservative treatment. Although her clinical condition improved, there was no significant improvement in portable chest X-ray results. DIAGNOSES: Due to concerns over the propagation of infection when transferring to patients for scanning and the need for excessive medical personnel to move patients, we moved a mobile chest computed tomography (CT) machine to an isolation ward for CT scanning. INTERVENTIONS: We report our experience using mobile chest CT to effectively allocate medical resources and assess treatment response in patient with COVID-19 pneumonia. OUTCOMES: Follow-up mobile CT scans disclosed progressive resolution of the multifocal ground-glass opacities and mixed consolidations distributed peripheral to subpleural spaces. During the mobile chest CT scan, there were no adverse or unforeseen events. Three medical personnel were required to performed mobile chest CT, including a clinician, a nurse, and a radiologist. LESSONS: As a result of using mobile chest CT on COVID-19 patients, the number of medical personnel required for CT scanning decreased by about 83%, rapid, and safe compared with a patient who performed conventional CT.

Usefulness of Mobile Computed Tomography in Patients with Coronavirus Disease 2019 Pneumonia: A Case Series.

The coronavirus disease (COVID-19) outbreak has reached global pandemic status as announced by the World Health Organization, which currently recommends reverse transcription polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR) as the standard diagnostic tool. However, although the RT-PCR test results may be found negative, there are cases that are found positive for COVID-19 pneumonia on computed tomography (CT) scan. CT is also useful in assessing the severity of COVID-19 pneumonia. When clinicians desire a CT scan of a patient with COVID-19 to monitor treatment response, a safe method for patient transport is necessary. To address the engagement of medical resources necessary to transport a patient with COVID-19, our institution has implemented the use of mobile CT. Therefore, we report two cases of COVID-19 pneumonia evaluated by using mobile cone-beam CT. Although mobile cone-beam CT had some limitations regarding its image quality such as scatter noise, motion and streak artifacts, and limited field of view compared with conventional multi-detector CT, both cases had acceptable image quality to establish the diagnosis of COVID-19 pneumonia. We report the usefulness of mobile cone-beam CT in patients with COVID-19 pneumonia.