A novel abnormality annotation database for covid-19 affected frontal lung x-rays

Abstract

Purpose:

To advance the usage of CXRs as a viable solution for efficient COVID-19 diagnostics by providing large-scale annotations of the abnormalities in frontal CXRs in BIMCV-COVID19+ database, and to provide a robust evaluation mechanism to facilitate its usage.

Materials and Methods:

We provide the abnormality annotations in frontal CXRs by creating bounding boxes. The frontal CXRs are a part of the existing BIMCV-COVID19+ database. We also define four different protocols for robust evaluation of semantic segmentation and classification algorithms. Finally, we benchmark the defined protocols and report the results using popular deep learning models as a part of this study.

Results:

For semantic segmentation, Mask-RCNN performs the best among all the models with a DICE score of 0.43 ± 0.01. For classification, we observe that MobileNetv2 yields the best results for 2-class and 3-class classification. We also observe that deep models report a lower performance for classifying other classes apart from the COVID class.

Conclusion:

By making the annotated data and protocols available to the scientific community, we aim to advance the usage of CXRs as a viable solution for efficient COVID-19 diagnostics. This large-scale data will be useful for ML algorithms and can be used for learning radiological patterns observed in COVID-19 patients. Further, the protocols will facilitate ML practitioners for unified large-scale evaluation of their algorithms.

For full paper: http://https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.01.07.21249323v2