Objective: In this study, we aimed to emphasize the importance and frequency of incidental findings detected in chest computed tomography (CT) imaging with suspected coronavirus disease-2019 (COVID-19) pneumonia.
Methods: We evaluated lung nodules, emphysema, pleural and pericardial effusion, mediastinal and axillary lymphadenopathy (LAP), gallstones, kidney stones, hepatosteatosis, ascites, lung, breast, liver, adrenal gland, pancreas, and spleen masses whether or not the patients were positive for COVID-19 pneumonia and correlated with their gender and age. Polymerase chain reaction results of the patients were considered whose CT images were suspicious for COVID-19 pneumonia with chest CT. A total of 2,400 patients were included in the study. Patients who had major thoracic or abdominal operations, aged 18 and above 80 years, and images with artifacts were excluded from our study.
Results: In older patients, the COVID-19 positivity rate was higher in our study. We also found that the risk of positive COVID-19 results was higher in the presence of incidental findings regardless of their number. Furthermore, incidental findings such as mediastinal LAP (p=0.001), air cyst (p=0.021), and size above 5 mm parenchymal lung nodule (p=0.001) were higher in patients whose COVID-19 results were positive.
Conclusion: We demonstrated that clinicians and radiologists should be careful in terms of incidental findings when evaluating whether there is COVID-19 involvement in our study.