ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on chest imaging because the lung is the most common portal of entry for suspected invasive fungal infection. Imaging plays a central role in the management of patients with suspected invasive fungal infection, especially in immunocompromised patients. Few critical clinical management decisions with respect to invasive fungal infection can be made without reference to chest Computed tomography findings. Although initial imaging findings of invasive fungal infection may be nonspecific, when they are interpreted in an appropriate clinical context, they can help narrow the differential diagnostic possibilities, identify important noninfectious disease, and, at times, justify pre-emptive specific therapy. Invasive pulmonary aspergillosis is the main example of a ubiquitous opportunistic mold that rarely causes invasive infection in the immunocompetent host, but frequently causes life-threatening primary invasive fungal pneumonia in the immunocompromised patient. Cryptococcus neoformans is the most common ubiquitous pathogenic fungus that causes clinical progressive primary lung infection in immune-competent patients.
