295 Le Infezioni in Medicina, n. 3, 295-301, 2020 REVIEWS Corresponding author Faisal Khosa E-mail: fkhosa@gmail.com n INTRODUCTION T he current pandemic of Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19), caused by Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus 2 (SARS- CoV-2), is responsible for a critical and acute res- piratory condition in some patients [1, 2]. By May 2020, more than 2 million cases have been report- ed worldwide, with more than 120,000 reported Chest computed tomography findings in hospitalized COVID-19 patients: a systematic review and meta-analysis Syed Zaki Muhammad 1 , Areeba Ahmed 1 , Izza Shahid 2 , Abdullah Khalid 3 , Ritesh G. Menezes 4 , Muhammad Usman Sheikh 5 , Tariq Jamal Siddiqi 1 , Muhammad Shariq Usman 1 , Faisal Khosa 6 1 Department of Internal Medicine, Dow University of Health Sciences, Karachi, Pakistan; 2 Department of Internal Medicine, Ziauddin Medical University, Karachi, Pakistan; 3 Department of Medicine, Baqai Medical University, Karachi, Pakistan; 4 Department of Pathology, College of Medicine, King Fahd Hospital of the University, Imam Abdulrahman Bin Faisal University, Dammam, Saudi Arabia; 5 Department of Medicine, John H. Stroger, Jr. Hospital of Cook County, Chicago, IL, USA; 6 Department of Radiology, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada deaths [3]. Currently, nucleic acid testing by Re- verse Transcription-Polymerase Chain Reaction (RT-PCR) is considered the gold standard for di- agnosing COVID-19. However, this test produces a considerable number of false negatives [4]. High false negatives can lead to misdiagnosis, especial- ly during initial stages where adequate treatment and isolation can help limit disease severity and prevent spread [5]. It has been shown that chest computed tomogra- phy (CT) imaging can show typical radiological fndings of COVID-19 even before the onset of clinical symptoms [6-8]. It has helped clinicians to Most studies evaluating chest computed tomography (CT) features in coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) have been small-sized and have presented varied fnd- ings. We aim to systematically review these studies and to conduct a meta-analysis of their results to provide a well-powered assessment of chest CT fndings in pa- tients with COVID-19. PubMed and EMBASE databas- es were systematically searched to identify published studies that evaluated chest CT fndings in COVID-19 patients. Data regarding study characteristics and CT fndings, including distribution of lesions, the lobe of lung involved, lesion densities, and radiological pat- terns, were extracted. Arcsine transformed proportions from individual studies were pooled using a ran- dom-effects model to derive pooled proportions (PPs) and 95% confdence intervals (CIs). A total of ffty-four studies (n=2693 confrmed COVID-19 patients) were SUMMARY included in the fnal review. Prevalence of different CT fndings varied across studies; however, the most com- mon fndings were bilateral pulmonary involvement (PP: 74.1% [68.4%, 79.5%]; I 2 =85.76%), ground glass opacifcation (PP: 64.6% [57.6%, 71.4%]; I 2 =91.52%), in- volvement of the left lower lobe (PP: 71.2% [58.9%, 82.1%]; I 2 =90.91%), and subpleural distribution of le- sions (PP: 57.2% [39.0%, 74.3%]; I 2 =93.08%). Multivari- ate meta-regression revealed a positive association be- tween prevalence of air bronchograms and average age of the population (p=0.013). Bilateral ground glass opacifcation, a subpleural distribution of lesions, and involvement of the left lower lobe were the most nota- ble chest CT fndings in COVID-19 patients. Keywords: COVID-19, SARS-CoV-2, chest computed to- mography, ground glass opacities.