Systematic review and meta-analysis of the CT imaging characteristics of infectious pneumonia

Abstract

Background: Since December 2019, there have been cases of infectious pneumonia of unknown cause in Wuhan, Hubei Province, China. On January 12, 2020, the World Health Organization (WHO) named it COVID-19. There are few studies on the clinical characteristics of patients with COVID-19, and results vary widely in sample sizes. Methods: Chinese and English databases were searched with “Infectious pneumonia”, “COVID-19”, “CT”, “SARS-COV-2”, and “Diagnose” as keywords. Rev Man 5.3 software provided by the Cochrane system was used to assess the quality of the included literature. Results: Of the 18 included studies, ground-glass shadow was the most common computed tomography (CT) sign [95% confidence interval (CI): 0.79–0.97], followed by thickening of the blood vessels (95% CI: 0.63–0.78), and pleural thickening (95% CI: 0.02–0.15). Of the 18 studies, 12 reported that the lesions were externally subpleural (95% CI: 0.132–0.173), and 6 reported that the lesions were distributed in a single lobe (95% CI: 0.598–0.841). The heterogeneity test results showed that the morphology of the lesions was cord-like (95% CI: 0.092–0.172), grid-like (95% CI: 0.152–0.193), patchy (95% CI: 0.192–0.313), and nodular (95% CI: 0.591–0.745). Discussion: Ground-glass opacity was a typical CT manifestation for patients with infectious pneumonia, and CT signs were instrumental in diagnosing this disease.