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.