- Published
- 01 November 2021
- Journal article
An overview of the National COVID-19 Chest Imaging Database: data quality and cohort analysis
- Authors
- Source
- GigaScience
Abstract
Background: The National COVID-19 Chest Imaging Database (NCCID) is a centralized database containing mainly chest X-rays and computed tomography scans from patients across the UK. The objective of the initiative is to support a better understanding of the coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 disease (COVID-19) and the development of machine learning technologies that will improve care for patients hospitalized with a severe COVID-19 infection. This article introduces the training dataset, including a snapshot analysis covering the completeness of clinical data, and availability of image data for the various use-cases (diagnosis, prognosis, longitudinal risk). An additional cohort analysis measures how well the NCCID represents the wider COVID-19-affected UK population in terms of geographic, demographic, and temporal coverage.
Findings: The NCCID offers high-quality DICOM images acquired across a variety of imaging machinery; multiple time points including historical images are available for a subset of patients. This volume and variety make the database well suited to development of diagnostic/prognostic models for COVID-associated respiratory conditions. Historical images and clinical data may aid long-term risk stratification, particularly as availability of comorbidity data increases through linkage to other resources. The cohort analysis revealed good alignment to general UK COVID-19 statistics for some categories, e.g., sex, whilst identifying areas for improvements to data collection methods, particularly geographic coverage.
Conclusion: The NCCID is a growing resource that provides researchers with a large, high-quality database that can be leveraged both to support the response to the COVID-19 pandemic and as a test bed for building clinically viable medical imaging models.
Rights
© The Author(s) 2021. Published by Oxford University Press GigaScience. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted reuse, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Cite as
Cushnan, D., Bennett, O., Berka, R., Bertolli, O., Chopra, A., Dorgham, S., Favaro, A., Ganepola, T., Halling-Brown, M., Imreh, G., Jacob, J., Jefferson, E., Lemarchand, F., Schofield, D., Wyatt, J. & NCCID Collaborative 2021, 'An overview of the National COVID-19 Chest Imaging Database: data quality and cohort analysis', GigaScience, 10(11), article no: giab076. https://doi.org/10.1093/gigascience/giab076