key: cord-0687481-fxyuvj24
authors: Tsakok, M.; Chetan, M.; Shaw, R.; Wing, L.; Peschl, H.
title: Preoperative COVID-19 CT screening in renal transplant recipients
date: 2020-08-14
journal: Clinical Radiology
DOI: 10.1016/j.crad.2020.08.004
sha: 14427f5dd45b945f5ba1f6c5ea78be03c79209b9
doc_id: 687481
cord_uid: fxyuvj24

nan

Sir-We read with great interest the findings from the Royal College of Radiologists (RCR) national audit, which demonstrated the low sensitivity for the identification of COVID-19 in a preoperative group of patients making it difficult to justify computed tomography (CT) screening during the pandemic in the UK 1 . This corroborates our own experience 2 and that of another institution 3 in demonstrating a low diagnostic yield of CT for COVID-19 in this cohort of patients; however, in this letter, we would like to also highlight the potential impact that our reports may have in a specific cohort: renal transplant patients.

At our institution, renal transplantation continued throughout the pandemic. In the early stages of the pandemic, we performed preoperative thoracic CT as reverse transcription polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR) testing was not available for preoperative patients. Subsequently, CT was performed in cases where RT-PCR results would not be available in an acceptable time frame prior to the operation.

Here, we correlate imaging findings with PCR and re-evaluate the imaging of those patients who had CT findings classic or indeterminate for COVID-19 pneumonia, as well as determine how the radiology report affected clinical care.

We performed a retrospective study of the potential renal transplant recipients who have undergone CT chest screening for COVID-19 from 27/3/20 to 9/6/20. The study took place as part of a Trust retrospective audit and the requirement for informed consent was waived. Seventy-four CT chest examinations took place in 68 patients, Table 1 and Fig. 1) . In three cases, both thoracic radiologists interpreted CT examinations as non-COVID-19 (a combination of fluid overload, infection and expiratory study) when originally the examinations had been reported as indeterminate by non-thoracic cross-sectional radiologists. There was a 48.15% overall agreement amongst the three raters (original report and re-review). The 

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Chest CT screening for COVID-19 in elective and emergency surgical patients: experience from a UK tertiary centre

Diagnostic utility of additional whole-chest CT as part of an acute abdominal pain CT imaging pathway during the COVID-19 pandemic

Validation of the British Society of Thoracic Imaging guidelines for COVID-19 chest radiograph reporting

COVID 19 rapid guideline: renal transplantation. NICE guideline [NG178

E-mail address: maria.tsakok@doctors.org.uk