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New findings have found that COVID-19 can be diagnosed using the same emergency scans intended to diagnose a stroke. This discovery has important implications for the treatment of patients who present with suspected stroke.
Tom Booth, study leader and senior lecturer in neuroimaging at King’s College London, said emergency scans captured images of the upper part of the lungs where a sponginess known as ‘ground glass opacification’ allowed the diagnosis of COVID-19. .
225 patients from 3 London hyper-acute stroke units were examined. The emergency stroke scan consisted of a computed tomography (CT) scan of the blood vessels in the head and neck.
“Apical ground glass opacification was present in 22.2% (50/225) of the patients. Ground glass opacification had high inter-rater reliability (Fleiss κ = 0.81, 95% CI 0.68-0.95) and, compared to reverse transcriptase polymerase chain reaction, had a good diagnostic performance (sensitivity, 75% [95% CI, 56–87]; specificity, 81% [95% CI, 71–88]; O = 11.65 [95% CI, 4.14–32.78]; P<.001) in multivariate analysis, ”the researchers wrote.
He added that the results show that when the team saw these changes in the upper part of the lungs during the emergency scan, they were able to reliably and accurately diagnose COVID-19, and the changes also predicted increased mortality.
“This is particularly relevant given the limitations of currently available coronavirus 2 reverse transcriptase polymerase chain reaction (SARS-CoV-2) tests, as the test takes time to complete and is sometimes inaccurate.” Booth said. “Additionally, our data has prognostic information given the increased mortality in those with lung changes shown in our cohort. These are useful results because the changes are easy for radiologists and other clinicians to see. This is” free information. “of an exploration destined for another but extremely valuable purpose.”
The findings were published in the American journal of neuroradiology.
“Our findings have important implications for the treatment of patients presenting with suspected stroke through early identification of COVID-19 and subsequent limitation of disease transmission,” the researchers concluded.
