Abstract

During the Covid-19 epidemic period, there were too many patient applications to emergency services all over the world. Due to the insufficient number of radiologists, patients had to wait a long time for chest computed tomography (CCT) radiology reports. This situation caused intensity, chaos and poor quality healthcare provision. During the pandemic period, it was aimed to reduce the unnecessary intensity of emergency services and to provide more effective services. This study aimed to evaluate the consistency of the computed tomography (CT) findings associated with Coronavirus disease 2019 (Covid-19), published by the Radiological Society of North America (RSNA), with the radiology reports issued by emergency medicine specialists (EMS). The study universe consisted of 372 patients who had chest computed tomography (CCT) scan and real-time reverse transcription-polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR) test for due to severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2). CCT was categorized into four (4) groups (being typical, indeterminate, atypical and negative). The relationship between CCT consensus classification and RT-PCR was examined. It was observed that radiology reports were consistent with EMS evaluations in four categories (κ value 0.96, 95% CI 0.95-0.97). When we evaluated the groups separately in terms of consistency by four categories, results for all the categories were very good, being typical (κ 0.98, 95% CI 97–0.99), indeterminate (κ 0.94, 95% CI 0.91–0.97), atypical (κ 0.89, 95% CI 0.93–0.85) and negative (κ 0.98, 95% CI 0.99–0.97). According to the results of PCR tests, cases in the categories were positive as follows: typical 94%, indeterminate 54%, atypical 47%, and negative 45% (p

Key words: Covid-19, Chest CT, RSNA