key points to convey:
- relevance of imaging for COVID patients
- need for research resources to better understand imaging data in relation to COVID
- TCIA is uniquely positioned to help make these data available asap
- where/how do you find COVID data on TCIA?
As the COVID-19 pandemic unfolds, imaging is playing an increasingly vital role in determining therapeutic options, patient care management and new research directions. 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 an urgent public health need to have COVID-19 image data 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 image sets public since it is uniquely ready to carry out a short term effort COVID-19 patient images for immediate reference by the community.