Computational fluid dynamics can detect changes in airway resistance for patients after COVID-19 infection

Abstract

Infection with COVID-19 can cause severe complication in the respiratory system, which may be related to increased respiratory resistance. Computational fluid dynamics(CFD) was used in this study to calculate the airway resistance based on the airway anatomy and a common air flowrate. The correlation between airway resistance and COVID-19 prognosis was then investigated. A total of 23 COVID-19 patients with 54 CT scans were grouped into the good prognosis and bad prognosis group based on whether the CT scan shows significant decrease in the pneumonia volume after one week treatment and retrospectively analyzed. A baseline group of 8 healthy people with the same age and gender ratio is enrolled for comparison. Results show that the airway resistance at admission is significantly higher for COVID-19 patients with poor prognosis than those with good prognosis and the baseline(0.063 ± 0.055 vs 0.029 ± 0.011 vs 0.017 ± 0.006 Pa/(ml/s),p = 0.01). In the left superior lobe (r = 0.3974,p = 0.01),left inferior lobe (r = 0.4843,p < 0.01), the right inferior lobe (r = 0.5298,p < 0.0001), the airway resistance was significantly correlated with the degree of pneumonia infection. It is concluded that for COVID-19 patients', airway resistance at admission is closely associated with their prognosis, and has the clinical potential to be used as an index for patients' diagnosis.

Keywords: Airway resistance; Biomechanics; COVID-19; Computational fluid dynamics(CFD); Pulmonary function.