Learning points: Cushing's syndrome can present in many ways, a high index of suspicion is required for its diagnosis, as often patients present with only few of the pathognomonic symptoms and signs of the syndrome.Proximal lower-limb girdle myopathy is common in Cushing's syndrome. Less often long-term exposure of excess glucocorticoid production can also affect other muscles including respiratory muscle and the diaphragm leading to progressive shortness of breath and even acute respiratory failure.Treatment of Cushing's myopathy involves treating the underlying cause that is hypercortisolism. Various medications have been suggested to hinder the development of GC-induced myopathy, but their effects are poorly analysed.
METHODS: Overall, 612 patients (306 COVID-19 and 306 non-COVID-19 pneumonia) were recruited. Twenty radiological features were extracted from CT images to evaluate the pattern, location, and distribution of lesions of patients in both groups. All significant CT features were fed in five classifiers namely decision tree, K-nearest neighbor, naïve Bayes, support vector machine, and ensemble to evaluate the best performing CAD system in classifying COVID-19 and non-COVID-19 cases.
RESULTS: Location and distribution pattern of involvement, number of the lesion, ground-glass opacity (GGO) and crazy-paving, consolidation, reticular, bronchial wall thickening, nodule, air bronchogram, cavity, pleural effusion, pleural thickening, and lymphadenopathy are the significant features to classify COVID-19 from non-COVID-19 groups. Our proposed CAD system obtained the sensitivity, specificity, and accuracy of 0.965, 93.54%, 90.32%, and 91.94%, respectively, using ensemble (COVIDiag) classifier.
CONCLUSIONS: This study proposed a COVIDiag model obtained promising results using CT radiological routine features. It can be considered an adjunct tool by the radiologists during the current COVID-19 pandemic to make an accurate diagnosis.
KEY POINTS: • Location and distribution of involvement, number of lesions, GGO and crazy-paving, consolidation, reticular, bronchial wall thickening, nodule, air bronchogram, cavity, pleural effusion, pleural thickening, and lymphadenopathy are the significant features between COVID-19 from non-COVID-19 groups. • The proposed CAD system, COVIDiag, could diagnose COVID-19 pneumonia cases with an AUC of 0.965 (sensitivity = 93.54%; specificity = 90.32%; and accuracy = 91.94%). • The AUC, sensitivity, specificity, and accuracy obtained by radiologist diagnosis are 0.879, 87.10%, 88.71%, and 87.90%, respectively.