classification of high-resolution computed tomography manifestations for covid-19 patients: a systematic review

Context: the early detection of covid-19 is of paramount importance for the disease treatment and control. as real-time reverse-transcription polymerase chain reaction indicates a low sensitivity, the computed tomography of patients’ chest can play an effective role in the diagnosis of covid-19, particularly for patients with false-negative rt-pcr tests. it is also effective in monitoring the clinical trends and assessing the severity of the disease. objectives: accordingly, this study aimed to review the different manifestations of the covid-19 infections in high-resolution computed tomography images of patients’ chests and analyze the distribution of the disease in the lungs. the results can contribute to providing a comprehensive and concise reference on the appearance of various types of involvement and lung lesions and the extent of these lesions in the covid-19 patients. data sources: we systematically searched four major indexing databases (namely pubmed, science direct, google scholar, and cochrane central) for articles published by may 2021 using the following keywords: high-resolution computed tomography (hrct), covid-19, and manifestations. results: overall, 29 studies addressing the role of hrct in detecting and evaluating the manifestations of the covid-19 infection in patients’ lungs as ground glass opacification (ggo), consolidation, irregular solid nodules, fibrous stripes, crazy paving pattern, air bronchogram sign, etc. were reviewed. conclusions: ggo was the most common finding, as reported in 96.6% of the reviewed articles, followed by consolidations (65.5%) and irregular solid nodules (55.2%). most patients revealed the disease process as a bilateral distribution in the peripheral areas of the lung.