Table 1.
Clinical characteristics of all patients.
Table 2.
Laboratory test results of inflammation-related parameters.
Table 3.
Image characteristics and severity scores of chest CT scans (N = 73).
Fig 1.
Serial chest images of a 57-year-old man with fever and dry cough.
(a-d) 12 days before the death, chest CT with axial, coronal, sagittal planes showed moderate lung involvement with a total CT score of 11, with subpleural ground-glass opacities and patches of consolidation in bilateral lungs. (e-f) 4 days before the death, chest CT with different planes showed severe lung involvement with a total score of 20, with the appearance of the white lung.
Fig 2.
Serial chest images of a 33-year-old man with fever and dyspnea.
(a-d) 16 days before death, chest CT with axial, coronal, sagittal planes showed moderate lung involvement with a total CT score of 11, appearing as ground-glass opacities (GGOs) with patches of consolidation in bilateral lungs. (e-f) 12 days before death, chest CT with different planes showed severe lung involvement with a total score of 19, appearing as diffusion GGOs with consolidation (white lung).
Fig 3.
Serial chest images of a 59-year-old man with fever, dyspnea, and dry cough.
(a-d) 17 days before death, chest CT with axial, coronal, sagittal planes showed minimal lung involvement with a total CT score of 1, a small piece of ground-glass opacity was found in the right lower lobe. (e-f) 10 days before death, chest CT with different planes showed severe lung involvement with a total score of 19, with an appearance of the white lung.
Table 4.
Dynamic changes of imaging features and severity scores between the initial and follow-up CT scans (N = 15).
Table 5.
The mean CT scores (mean±sd) the number of patients/CT scans [n (%)] for the different severities of lung involvement between initial chest CT scans and follow-up chest CT scan (N = 15 patients), and among the different periods before the death (N = 93 CT scans).
Fig 4.
The correlations of CT scores and inflammation-related parameters.