Introduction
The novel coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) has spread all over the
world(1). The pathogen has been named novel severe acute respiratory
syndrome coronavirus-2 (SARS-CoV-2), an enveloped RNA virus(2). The
number of confirmed COVID-19 cases is growing rapidly. There have been
nearly 45 million confirmed cases globally and over 1 million deaths at
the time of this manuscript submission, according to the data of the
World Health Organization (https://covid19.who.int/).
COVID-19 could cause a wide variety of symptoms such as dyspnea,
headache, myalgia, fever, cough, and altered smell or taste(3). The most
of morbidity and mortality from this disease have been originated
pulmonary(4). This disease also maybe sometimes asymptomatic. Besides,
many researches are supported that the illness can also present with
non-respiratory symptoms such as abdominal pain, and diarrhea(5, 6).
The presence of these nonspecific symptoms may cause delaying the
diagnosis of the disease. The early diagnosis plays an important role to
prevent the spread of the disease and avoids the rapidly deteriorating
patients with COVID-19(7). The standard method for a confirmed diagnosis
of the disease is a real-time polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR). There
are some shortcomings related to this diagnostic test (RT-PCR;
typically, nasopharyngeal swab). These shortcomings include
false-positive results, false-negative results, and late diagnosis(8).
Chest computed tomography (CT) is not recommended as the first
diagnostic tool, but it can be used as an important complementary
diagnostic tool in addition to RT-PCR(7). The most common imaging
findings on chest CT are ground-glass opacities without lung cavitation,
discrete pulmonary nodules, and bilateral patchy shadowing. Also, can be
seen some patterns such as bronchial wall thickening, linear
opacities(1).
However, diagnosis in asymptomatic patients or patients with
non-respiratory symptoms remains a big concern. Many patients with
COVID-19 pneumonia can admit to the clinic with symptoms such as
abdominal pain and renal colic. These abnormal symptoms can have
resulted in requests for abdominal CT. In this study, we aimed to
evaluate the incidence of missed diagnosed COVID-19 pneumonia on
abdominal CT performed in patients admitted to our urology outpatient
clinic.