rtificial intelligence (AI) algorithms have existed for decades and have recently been propelled to the forefront of medical imaging research. To a large extent, this is related to improvements in computing power, availability of a large amount of training data, and innovative and improved neural network architectures, with the recognition that certain types of algorithms are well suited to image analysis. The latter discovery was accelerated by the ImageNet competition and represents a fundamental transformation in research mechanics and methods in computer vision.Currently, in most studies, researchers collect data, perform analysis, and publish results. The same researchers may continue to augment and expand the data set and perform subsequent analysis with resulting publications. The data for each study are held quite closely and are rarely shared among institutions outside of multicenter trials. Competitions represent a different model of research: Research data are made available to the public, usually with a baseline performance metric. Groups around the world are invited to analyze the data and create algorithms to beat the performance of the prior generation. For example, the baseline performance metric for this challenge was set by the previous skeletal age model developed by Larson et al (1).The Radiological Society of North America (RSNA) Pediatric Bone Age Machine Learning Challenge was created to evaluate the performance of computer algorithms in executing a common image analysis activity that is familiar to many pediatric radiologists: estimating the bone age of pediatric patients based on radiographs of their hand (1-5). This challenge used a data set of pediatric
T he scientific, academic, medical and data science communities have come together in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic crisis to rapidly assess novel paradigms in artificial intelligence (AI) that are rapid and secure, and potentially incentivize data sharing and model training and testing without the usual privacy and data ownership hurdles of conventional collaborations 1,2 . Healthcare providers, researchers and industry have pivoted their focus to address unmet and critical clinical needs created by the crisis, with remarkable results [3][4][5][6][7][8][9] . Clinical trial recruitment has been expedited and facilitated by national regulatory bodies and an international cooperative spirit 10-12 . The data analytics and AI disciplines have always fostered open
† People involved in the organization of the challenge. ‡ People contributing data from their institutions.§ Equal senior authors.
The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic is a global health care emergency. Although reverse-transcription polymerase chain reaction testing is the reference standard method to identify patients with COVID-19 infection, chest radiography and CT play a vital role in the detection and management of these patients. Prediction models for COVID-19 imaging are rapidly being developed to support medical decision making. However, inadequate availability of a diverse annotated data set has limited the performance and generalizability of existing models. To address this unmet need, the RSNA and Society of Thoracic Radiology collaborated to develop the RSNA International COVID-19 Open Radiology Database (RICORD). This database is the first multi-institutional, multinational, expert-annotated COVID-19 imaging data set. It is made freely available to the machine learning community as a research and educational resource for COVID-19 chest imaging. Pixel-level volumetric segmentation with clinical annotations was performed by thoracic radiology subspecialists for all COVID-19–positive thoracic CT scans. The labeling schema was coordinated with other international consensus panels and COVID-19 data annotation efforts, the European Society of Medical Imaging Informatics, the American College of Radiology, and the American Association of Physicists in Medicine. Study-level COVID-19 classification labels for chest radiographs were annotated by three radiologists, with majority vote adjudication by board-certified radiologists. RICORD consists of 240 thoracic CT scans and 1000 chest radiographs contributed from four international sites. It is anticipated that RICORD will ideally lead to prediction models that can demonstrate sustained performance across populations and health care systems. © RSNA, 2021 Online supplemental material is available for this article. See also the editorial by Bai and Thomasian in this issue.
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