Introduction
A current outbreak of pneumonia related to a novel coronavirus, termed
severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), was
reported in Wuhan, Hubei province, China in December 2019. The infection
spread across other countries round the world (Zhu et al.). On January
30, 2020, the World Health Organization (WHO) stated the outbreak a
Public Health Emergency of International Concern (Sohrabi et al.,
2020).the symptoms of COVID-19 can be fever, dry cough,
fatigue, shortness
of breath, myalgia or even no symptoms (Diao et al., 2020, Wan et al.,
2020, Shang et al., 2020, Huang et al., 2020, Zarghami et al.,
2020).likewise, the studies revealed that older age, male gender,
leukocytosis, and Blood laboratory findings, also, comorbidities such as
high lactate dehydrogenase level, cardiac injury, hypertension, diabetes
mellitus, hypothyroidism, coronary artery disease, smoking and
hyperglycemia, were related to weak prognosis in COVID-19 patients
(Zhang et al., 2020b, Li et al., 2020, Zarghami et al., 2019).Though,
information concerning to clinical features of COVID-19 is still making
it difficult for physicians to distinguish the causative agents without
related laboratory analysis(Wu and
McGoogan,
2020).Furthermore, reverse
transcription-polymerase chain reaction (RT-), the gold standard for
confirming diagnosis of COVID-19, has some restrictions, such as
false
negative results and limited sampling method and the rate of high false
negative and unavailability of in the early stage of the outbreak
restricted fast diagnosis of infection in patients(Fang et al.,
2020). The high resolution computed tomography (HRCT) of the chest is
progressively recognized as a strong indicator for early diagnosis, and
can be the key to the evaluation of COVID-19 suspected patients because
the changes
in chest
imaging sometimes maybe earlier than symptoms (He et al., 2020). HRCT
is strongly recommended because it is very sensitive to detecting early
disease, assessing the nature and extent of lesions (Yang et al.,
2020a). Other investigators examined chest HRCTs in infected patients
and found high rates of ground-glass opacities and consolidation,
sometimes with a rounded morphology and peripheral lung distribution
(Yang et al., 2020b, Pan et al., 2020, Chung et al., 2020).
Chest HRCT can identify the early phase lung infection(Wong et al.,
2020, Kanne, 2020) and prompt larger public health surveillance and
response systems (Ng et al., 2020). Currently, chest HRCT have been
recommended as main evidence for confirmed clinical and laboratory
diagnosis. Considering the previous studies, the purpose of the study is
to make the early diagnosis, by describing the complete chest HRCT
appearances, related laboratory analysis and clinical features of
patients with COVID-19, who were hospitalized to the Imam Khomeini
Hospital .