POLCOVID: a multicenter multiclass chest X-ray database (Poland, 2020–2021)

Abstract

The outbreak of the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic has put healthcare systems worldwide to their limits, resulting in increased waiting time for diagnosis and required medical assistance. With chest radiographs (CXR) being one of the most common COVID-19 diagnosis methods, many artificial intelligence tools for image-based COVID-19 detection have been developed, often trained on a small number of images from COVID-19-positive patients. Thus, the need for high-quality and well-annotated CXR image databases increased. This paper introduces POLCOVID dataset, containing chest X-ray (CXR) images of patients with COVID-19 or other-type pneumonia, and healthy individuals gathered from 15 Polish hospitals. The original radiographs are accompanied by the preprocessed images limited to the lung area and the corresponding lung masks obtained with the segmentation model. Moreover, the manually created lung masks are provided for a part of POLCOVID dataset and the other four publicly available CXR image collections. POLCOVID dataset can help in pneumonia or COVID-19 diagnosis, while the set of matched images and lung masks may serve for the development of lung segmentation solutions.

Pathological changes or technical artefacts? The problem of the heterogenous databases in COVID-19 CXR image analysis

“…The study included two sources of CXR images, the COVIDx database [25] and the POLCOVID database [26] . The COVIDx database in version 8B includes 2 358 lung X-ray images of people diagnosed with COVID-19 gathered by the community.…”