Overview
Five times more deadly than the flu, COVID-19 causes significant morbidity and mortality. Like other pneumonias, pulmonary infection with COVID-19 results in inflammation and fluid in the lungs. COVID-19 looks very similar to other viral and bacterial pneumonias on chest radiographs, which makes it difficult to diagnose. Your computer vision model to detect and localize COVID-19 would help doctors provide a quick and confident diagnosis. As a result, patients could get the right treatment before the most severe effects of the virus take hold.
Currently, COVID-19 can be diagnosed via polymerase chain reaction to detect genetic material from the virus or chest radiograph. However, it can take a few hours and sometimes days before the molecular test results are back. By contrast, chest radiographs can be obtained in minutes. While guidelines exist to help radiologists differentiate COVID-19 from other types of infection, their assessments vary. In addition, non-radiologists could be supported with better localization of the disease, such as with a visual bounding box.
As the leading healthcare organization in their field, the Society for Imaging Informatics in Medicine (SIIM)'s mission is to advance medical imaging informatics through education, research, and innovation. SIIM has partnered with the Foundation for the Promotion of Health and Biomedical Research of Valencia Region (FISABIO), Medical Imaging Databank of the Valencia Region (BIMCV) and the Radiological Society of North America (RSNA) for this competition.
In this competition, you’ll identify and localize COVID-19 abnormalities on chest radiographs. In particular, you'll categorize the radiographs as negative for pneumonia or typical, indeterminate, or atypical for COVID-19. You and your model will work with imaging data and annotations from a group of radiologists.
Data code Discussion
