Response to “Enhancing the Study of Long-Term Pulmonary Sequelae After COVID-19: Methodological Perspectives on Imaging and Clinical Integration”

We appreciate the interest of Dong et al. [1] in our recent publication and their thoughtful comments on future research directions for post-COVID-19 pulmonary sequelae [2].While we agree that quantitative CT, closer integration of imaging with clinical outcomes, artificial intelligence (AI)-assisted standardization, and refined radiological phenotyping may strengthen future prospective studies, these approaches were beyond the scope of our study, which was designed to provide a study-level metaanalysis of the currently available long-term follow-up literature.Their letter [1] suggested the use of quantitative CT descriptors and deep learning-based reconstruction algorithms to detect subtle parenchymal abnormalities.We