Background

The COVID-19 pandemic is a global healthcare emergency. Prediction models for COVID-19 imaging are rapidly being developed to support medical decision making in imaging. However, inadequate availability of a diverse annotated dataset has limited the performance and generalizability of existing models.

Purpose

To create the first multi-institutional, multi-national expert annotated COVID-19 imaging dataset made freely available to the machine learning community as a research and educational resource for COVID-19 chest imaging. RICORD data will be incorporated in the Medical Imaging and Data Resource Center (MIDRC), a multi-institutional research data repository funded by the National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering of the National Institutes of Health.

Materials and Methods

This dataset was created through a collaboration between the RSNA and Society of Thoracic Radiology (STR). Pixel-level volumetric segmentation with clinical annotations by thoracic radiology subspecialists was performed for all COVID positive thoracic computed tomography (CT) imaging studies in a labeling schema coordinated with other international consensus panels and COVID data annotation efforts, European Society of Medical Imaging Informatics (EUSOMII), the American College of Radiology (ACR) and the American Association of Physicists in Medicine (AAPM).

Results

The RSNA International COVID-19 Open Annotated Radiology Database (RICORD) consists of 1,000 chest x-rays (there are 998 studies) from four international sites annotated with diagnostic labels.

Patient Selection: Patients at least 18 years in age receiving positive diagnosis for COVID-19.

Data Abstract

1. 1,000 Chest x-ray examinations. There are 998 studies.

2. Annotations with labels (Typical Appearance, Indeterminate Appearance, Atypical Appearance, Negative for Pneumonia, Mild Opacities (1-2 lung zones), Moderate Opacities (3-4 lung zones), Severe Opacities (>4 lung zones), Invalid Study.

3. Supporting clinical variables: MRN*, Age, Exam Date/Time*, Exam Description, Sex, Study UID*, Image Count, Modality, Symptomatic, Testing Result, Specimen Source (* pseudonymous values). (clinical data needed)

Research Benefits

RICORD is available for non-commercial use (and further enrichment) by the research and education communities which may include development of educational resources for COVID-19, use of RICORD to create AI systems for diagnosis and quantification, benchmarking performance for existing solutions, exploration of distributed/federated learning, further annotation or data augmentation efforts, and evaluation of the examinations for disease entities beyond COVID-19 pneumonia. Deliberate consideration of the detailed annotation schema, demographics, and other included meta-data will be critical when generating cohorts with RICORD, particularly as more public COVID-19 imaging datasets are made available via complementary and parallel efforts. It is important to emphasize that there are limitations to the clinical “ground truth” as the SARS-CoV-2 RT-PCR tests have widely documented limitations and are subject to both false-negative and false-positive results1,4 which impact the distribution of the included imaging data, and may have led to an unknown epidemiologic distortion of patients based on the inclusion criteria. These limitations notwithstanding, RICORD has achieved the stated objectives for data complexity, heterogeneity, and high-quality expert annotations as a comprehensive COVID-19 thoracic imaging data resource.