Korean J Radiol.  2020 Aug;21(8):1018-1023. 10.3348/kjr.2020.0541.

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

• Rho JY
• Yoon KH
• Jeong S
• Lee JH
• Park C
• Kim HW

• KMID: 2505140
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.3348/kjr.2020.0541

Abstract

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

Keyword

Coronavirus; Pneumonia; COVID-19; Computed tomography; Mobile