RADIOLOGY PRACTICES DURING COVID-19 ERA

Abstract

COVID-19 pandemic has affected tens of millions and killed more than 1.3 million of people around the globe since December 2019. However, unlike the Spanish flu pandemic about a century ago, the magnitude of fatality is significantly low so far despite of its high contagiousness.  The primary reasons for this outcome are effective communication among the various parts of globe, coherent strategies designed by world health organization (WHO) and health authorities of various countries, knowledge sharing, introduction of lock down and social distancing, etc. COVID-19 has changed the global financial, social and health dynamics with various conspiracy theories revolving around too.

With the passage of time, researchers have explored the facts behind COVID pneumonia and pathogenesis of other systems leading to multi organ failure in infected patients dying. A recent study using CT pulmonary angiography (CTPA) suggest that the development of pulmonary thromboembolism (PTE) in patients with COVID-19 is a manifestation of pulmonary artery thrombosis due to lung inflammation rather than venous thromboembolism. The same study also found different parameters between deceased and survivors. The patients died of COVID-19 were older, with a median age of 69, and more likely to have comorbidities such as hypertension, diabetes, and coronary heart disease; they also tended to have higher C-reactive protein (78.11 mg/L compared with 10.85 mg/L) and D-dimer (1.98 mg/L compared with 0.30 mg/L) values. These researchers also found that deceased’ CT did show diffuse lesions, bilateral involvement and higher CT severity score than survivors’ CT. The researchers of this study concluded that the presence of predominant crazy-paving pattern on chest CT with the high and rapidly increased CT scores may help to identify the patients at high risk of developing acute respiratory ARDS before clinical deterioration.