Preliminary analysis
pulmonary deterioration
To test H1 and facilitate power calculation before conducting a full prospective clinical trial, two preliminary experiments were carried out.The first experiment involved 40 voluntary diagnostic radiologists. A call for volunteers reached physicians from eleven Romanian medical institutions. The eligibility criteria consisted of practising diagnostic radiologists of any level of experience on thoracic CTs. The participants estimated the total percentage of pulmonary deterioration in simulated CT slices based on a predelineated involvement contour (Fig. For the second experiment, a random sample of 109 studies of patients with RT–PCR-confirmed COVID-19 from HOSP-TM and EXMED were analysed retrospectively. Each study contained at least one noncontrast pulmonary CT investigation, and its corresponding radiological report, acquired between August 2021 and January 2022. The lung involvement percentages were automatically extracted using regular expressions and manually reviewed to correct for any parsing mistakes.