Lesion types, pathogenesis, pathological manifestations, and imaging findings of cardiovascular complications induced by coronavirus disease 2019

The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) has formed a worldwide pandemic trend. Despite the virus usually invades lungs and presents with various respiratory symptoms, it can also affect the cardiac function in multiple ways and result in high mortality. Various possible mechanisms have been proposed to explain these manifestations at present, including cytokine storm and direct invasion of the virus. There are a series of feasible schemes in clinical work to reduce the incidence of complications now, but the layered management of hospitalized patients, the early prevention, and the early detection of complications seem to be more important. Cardiac imaging examinations (such as computed tomography coronary angiography, magnetic resonance imaging multi-parameter scan, and enhanced scan, etc.) are very essential in these aspects. However, radiological data of the cardiac complications are not comprehensive enough in accessing the prognosis due to the limitation of examination. This paper summarized the imaging findings of cardiac complications of COVID-19, providing the possible morphological basis or hypothesis for cardiac multimode imaging by analyzing the pathological manifestations retrospectively.