Impaired pulmonary ventilation beyond pneumonia in COVID-19: A preliminary observation
UMass Chan Affiliations
Department of RadiologyDocument Type
Journal ArticlePublication Date
2022-01-25Keywords
COVID 19Pneumonia
Computed axial tomography
Dyspnea
Pulmonary imaging
Opacity
Reverse transcriptase-polymerase chain reaction
Medical hypoxia
Infectious Disease
Pulmonology
Radiology
Respiratory Tract Diseases
Virus Diseases
Metadata
Show full item recordAbstract
BACKGROUND: Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) may severely impair pulmonary function and cause hypoxia. However, the association of COVID-19 pneumonia on CT with impaired ventilation remains unexplained. This pilot study aims to demonstrate the relationship between the radiological findings on COVID-19 CT images and ventilation abnormalities simulated in a computational model linked to the patients' symptoms. METHODS: Twenty-five patients with COVID-19 and four test-negative healthy controls who underwent a baseline non-enhanced CT scan: 7 dyspneic patients, 9 symptomatic patients without dyspnea, and 9 asymptomatic patients were included. A 2D U-Net-based CT segmentation software was used to quantify radiological futures of COVID-19 pneumonia. The CT image-based full-scale airway network (FAN) flow model was employed to assess regional lung ventilation. Functional and radiological features were compared across groups and correlated with the clinical symptoms. Heterogeneity in ventilation distribution and ventilation defects associated with the pneumonia and the patients' symptoms were assessed. RESULTS: Median percentage ventilation defects were 0.2% for healthy controls, 0.7% for asymptomatic patients, 1.2% for symptomatic patients without dyspnea, and 11.3% for dyspneic patients. The median of percentage pneumonia was 13.2% for dyspneic patients and 0% for the other groups. Ventilation defects preferentially affected the posterior lung and worsened with increasing pneumonia linearly (y = 0.91x + 0.99, R2 = 0.73) except for one of the nine dyspneic patients who had disproportionally large ventilation defects (7.8% of the entire lung) despite mild pneumonia (1.2%). The symptomatic and dyspneic patients showed significantly right-skewed ventilation distributions (symptomatic without dyspnea: 0.86 +/- 0.61, dyspnea 0.91 +/- 0.79) compared to the patients without symptom (0.45 +/- 0.35). The ventilation defect analysis with the FAN model provided a comparable diagnostic accuracy to the percentage pneumonia in identifying dyspneic patients (area under the receiver operating characteristic curve, 0.94 versus 0.96). CONCLUSIONS: COVID-19 pneumonia segmentations from CT scans are accompanied by impaired pulmonary ventilation preferentially in dyspneic patients. Ventilation analysis with CT image-based computational modelling shows it is able to assess functional impairment in COVID-19 and potentially identify one of the aetiologies of hypoxia in patients with COVID-19 pneumonia.Source
Inui S, Yoon SH, Doganay O, Gleeson FV, Kim M. Impaired pulmonary ventilation beyond pneumonia in COVID-19: A preliminary observation. PLoS One. 2022 Jan 25;17(1):e0263158. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0263158. PMID: 35077496; PMCID: PMC8789183. Link to article on publisher's site
DOI
10.1371/journal.pone.0263158Permanent Link to this Item
http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.14038/27543PubMed ID
35077496Related Resources
Rights
Copyright: © 2022 Inui et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.Distribution License
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ae974a485f413a2113503eed53cd6c53
10.1371/journal.pone.0263158
Scopus Count
Except where otherwise noted, this item's license is described as Copyright: © 2022 Inui et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.