Coronavirus disease is an emerging infection caused by a novel coronavirus that is moving rapidly. High resolution computed tomography (CT) allows objective evaluation of the lung lesions, thus enabling us to better understand the pathogenesis of the disease. With serial CT examinations, the occurrence, development, and prognosis of the disease can be better understood. The imaging can be sorted into four phases: early phase, progressive phase, severe phase, and dissipative phase. The CT appearance of each phase and temporal progression of the imaging findings are demonstrated.

Chest imaging is of great importance for the diagnosis and management of patients with COVID-19 infection. However, it is easy to miss the diagnosis of early ground glass opacity (GGO) with plain chest radiography. Thus, computed tomography (CT), especially high-resolution CT (HRCT), is used for the early diagnosis of COVID-19 disease infection (). High-resolution CT allows objective evaluation of the lung lesions, thus enabling us to better understand the pathogenesis of the disease. With serial CT examinations, the occurrence, development, and prognosis of the disease can be comprehensively understood. Due to the high infectivity of the disease, histopathological examination has been limited. The advantage of CT over histologic examination is that CT can evaluate the whole lungs whereas histology is subject to sampling error, as it looks at only localized regions of the lungs. Here, we report the imaging findings and temporal progression of this disease.

Coronavirus disease (COVID-19) is an emerging infection that is caused by a novel coronavirus (). Since December 2019, when a number of COVID-19 cases emerged in Wuhan, Hubei Province, China, infection with COVID-19 has been declared an epidemic, with new cases emerging rapidly in other regions of China and across the world (). By March 4, 2020, a total of 80,424 patients have been diagnosed with COVID-19 infection, and 2984 patients have died.

METHODS AND MATERIALS

The cases reported in this study came from three hospitals (***) in China. All cases were confirmed by real-time reverse-transcriptase-polymerase chain reaction. Written informed consent was waived by our institutional review board. Due to the need for prevention and control of infection, chest radiography was adopted for ICU patients, whereas serial CT examinations were used for all other patients to monitor the dynamic changes of the disease.

CT examinations were performed with either a GE Optima 660 or Philips Brilliance CT scanner. The patients were placed in a supine position, with the head advanced and breathing on hold for scanning. The scanning parameters were as follows: 120 kV; 100–250 mAs; collimation of 5 mm; pitch of 1–1.5; matrix, 512 × 512. No contrast was administered. All images were transmitted to the postprocessing workstation to be reconstructed by high-resolution algorithms and conventional algorithms.