From Janet:
Increasingly we are learning that patients with novel COVID-19 infection have a variety of clinical presentations and outcomes. They may be asymptomatic with a positive test for infection, or exhibiting only mild cold like symptoms. Recent clinical experience has shown that chest imaging in infected patients may show specific lung findings that can be used to triage patients for isolation and predict for severe infection sequelae. To date, most experience has been with chest CT and plain ray exams. Use of imaging for COVID-19 infected patients is proving to be valuable for patient triage, risk assessment for poor outcome, particularly in at risk populations, and follow-up.
Because there is a public health need to have reference images for all disease stages freely available for caregivers immediately, the NCI Cancer Imaging Program (CIP) is utilizing its Cancer Imaging Archive (TCIA) as a resource for making these image set public. The TCIA has a primary mission to de-identify and host image datasets for public access and use. Because this resource has been designed to acquire image sets from investigators, it is uniquely ready to carry out a short term effort COVID-19 patient images for immediate reference by the community.
Fred UAMS proposal:
As the COVID-19 pandemic unfolds, radiology imaging is playing an increasingly vital role in determining therapeutic options, patient care management and new research directions. Publicly available imaging data is essential to drive new research. All too frequently rural populations are underrepresented in such public collections. We have published a collection of radiographic and CT imaging studies for patients who tested positive for COVID-19. Each patient is described by a unique set of clinical data correlates that includes demographics, comorbidities, selected lab data and key radiology findings. This data is cross-linked to SARS-COV-2 cDNA sequence data extracted from clinical isolates from the same population, published in GISAID. We believe this collection will help to define appropriate correlative data and contribute samples from this normally underrepresented population to the research community.As the COVID-19 pandemic unfolds, radiology imaging is playing an increasingly vital role in determining therapeutic options, patient care management and new research directions. Publicly available imaging data is essential to drive new research. All too frequently rural populations are underrepresented in such public collections. We have published a collection of radiographic and CT imaging studies for patients who tested positive for COVID-19. Each patient is described by a unique set of clinical data correlates that includes demographics, comorbidities, selected lab data and key radiology findings. This data is cross-linked to SARS-COV-2 cDNA sequence data extracted from clinical isolates from the same population, published in GISAID. We believe this collection will help to define appropriate correlative data and contribute samples from this normally underrepresented population to the research community.
Rural populations are seldom included in image analysis studies. This collection samples patients from a rural state and includes demographics, stage of the disease in which the images were collected and links to cDNA sequences of the virus strains sampled from the same population.
CIP editorial: https://pubs.rsna.org/doi/10.1148/rycan.2020204017
Imaging of COVID-19:
Chest CT findings are sensitive and moderately specific for diagnosis of COVID-19
associated pneumonia, but does not replace PCR for SARS-CoV-2
CXR and CT are very helpful to evaluate DDx and contributory factors
Chest CT helps management in complex scenarios / clinical deterioration
The value of imaging may increase with quantitative algorithms, addressing:
* What is the predominant pattern?
* What is the spatial distribution?
* How much of the lungs are involved?