"Multimodal" Imaging Performance and Clinical Application of Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) (preprint)

ABSTRACT

Background: To investigate the diagnostic value of three different examination methods of chest radiography (CXR), digital tomosynthesis (DTS) and Computed tomography (CT) scan on the diagnosis of novel coronavirus pneumonia (COVID-19).Methods: A retrospective analysis of three examination methods of chest CXR, DTS, and CT scan of COVID-19 pneumonia patients diagnosed in our hospital from January, 23, 2020 to February, 29, 2020. And we compared three different imaging methods to COVID-19 display ability of pneumonia intrapulmonary lesions.Results: A total of 37 patients diagnosed as COVID-19 by nucleic acid testing were included. The CXR group (10/37) and DTS group (21/28) of 37 patients with COVID-19 pneumonia showed significant differences in intrapulmonary ground glass opacities (P<0.05); DTS group (21/28) and CT group (25/27) showed no statistically significant differences in intrapulmonary ground glass opacities (P> 0.05). Conclusion: Comparison of the three imaging methods of COVID-19 pneumonia, the diagnostic efficiency of CXR is low, which is easy to be false negative and miss lesions; diagnostic resolutions of DTS are higher than CXR, which can improve the ability to display the fine structure of intrapulmonary lesions; CT scan shows the intrapulmonary of COVID-19 pneumonia low-density ground glass opacities and internal structures have equal capacity compared with DTS. Therefore, DTS and CT are the best choices for the image diagnosis of COVID-19 pneumonia.