Some patients with positive chest CT findings may present with negative results of real time reverse-transcription-polymerase chain-reaction (RT-PCR) for 2019 novel coronavirus (2019-nCoV). In this report, we present chest CT findings from five patients with 2019-nCoV infection who had initial negative RT-PCR results. All five patients had typical imaging findings, including ground-glass opacity (GGO) (5 patients) and/or mixed GGO and mixed consolidation (2 patients). After isolation for presumed 2019-nCoV pneumonia, all patients were eventually confirmed with 2019-nCoV infection by repeated swab tests. A combination of repeated swab tests and CT scanning may be helpful when for individuals with high clinical suspicion of nCoV infection but negative RT-PCR screening Abbreviations PT-PCR=reverse-transcription-polymerase chain-reaction GGO=ground glass opacity

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Background: The outbreak of a novel coronavirus (2019-nCoV)-infected pneumonia (NCIP) is currently ongoing in China. Most of the critically ill patients received high-flow nasal cannula (HFNC) oxygen therapy. However, the experience of HFNC in this population is lacking. Methods:We retrospectively screened 318 confirmed patients with NCIP in two hospitals of Chongqing, China, from January 1st to March 4th, 2020. Among them, 27 (8.4%) patients experienced severe acute respiratory failure including 17 patients (63%) treated with HFNC as first-line therapy, 9 patients (33%) treated with noninvasive ventilation (NIV) and one patient (4%) treated with invasive ventilation. HFNC failure was defined by the need of NIV or intubation as rescue therapy. Results:Of the 17 HFNC patients, 7 (41%) experienced HFNC failure. The HFNC failure rate was 0% (0/6) in patients with PaO 2 /FiO 2 > 200 mm Hg vs. 63% (7/11) in those with PaO 2 /FiO 2 ≤ 200 mm Hg (p = 0.04). Compared with baseline data, the respiratory rate significantly decreased after 1-2 h of HFNC in successful group , p = 0.03]. However, it did not in the unsuccessful group. After initiation of NIV as rescue therapy among the 7 patients with HFNC failure, PaO 2 /FiO 2 significantly improved after 1-2 h of NIV under HFNC, p = 0.04]. However, two out of seven (29%) patients with NIV as rescue therapy ultimately received intubation. Among the 27 patients with severe acute respiratory failure, four patients were eventually intubated (15%). Conclusions:Our study indicated that HFNC was the most common ventilation support for patients with NCIP. Patients with lower PaO 2 /FiO 2 were more likely to experience HFNC failure.

These authors contributed equally to this work. ⇤ Corresponding authors.The sudden outbreak of novel coronavirus 2019 (COVID-19) increased the diagnostic burden of radiologists. In the time of an epidemic crisis, we hoped artificial intelligence (AI) to help reduce physician workload in regions with the outbreak, and improve the diagnosis accuracy for physicians before they could acquire enough experience with the new disease. Here, we present our experience in building and deploying an AI system that automatically analyzes CT images to detect COVID-19 pneumonia features. Different from conventional medical AI, we were dealing with an epidemic crisis. Working in an interdisciplinary team of over 30 people with medical and / or AI background, geographically distributed in Beijing and Wuhan, we were able to overcome a series of challenges in this particular situation and deploy the system in four weeks. Using 1,136 training cases (723 positives for COVID-19) from five hospitals, we were able to achieve a sensitivity of 0.974 and specificity of 0.922 on the test dataset, which included a variety of pulmonary diseases. Besides, the system automatically highlighted all lesion regions for faster examination. As of today, we have deployed the system 2 All rights reserved. No reuse allowed without permission.