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

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.

Screening Support System Based on Patient Survey Data—Case Study on Classification of Initial, Locally Collected COVID-19 Data

New diseases constantly endanger the lives of populations, and, nowadays, they can spread easily and constitute a global threat. The COVID-19 pandemic has shown that the fight against a new disease may be difficult, especially at the initial stage of the epidemic, when medical knowledge is not complete and the symptoms are ambiguous. The use of machine learning tools can help to filter out those sick patients who do not need to be tested for spreading the pathogen, especially in the event of an overwhelming increase in disease transmission. This work presents a screening support system that can precisely identify patients who do not carry the disease. The decision of the system is made on the basis of patient survey data that are easy to collect. A case study on a data set of symptomatic COVID-19 patients shows that the system can be effective in the initial phase of the epidemic. The case study presents an analysis of two classifiers that were tuned to achieve an assumed acceptable threshold of negative predictive values during classification. Additionally, an explanation of the obtained classification models is presented. The explanation enables the users to understand the basis of the decision made by the model. The obtained classification models provide the basis for the DECODE service, which could serve as support in screening patients with COVID-19 disease at the initial stage of the pandemic. Moreover, the data set constituting the basis for the analyses performed is made available to the research community. This data set, consisting of more than 3000 examples, is based on questionnaires collected at a hospital in Poland.

Symptom-based early-stage differentiation between SARS-CoV-2 versus other respiratory tract infections-Upper Silesia pilot study.

In the DECODE project, data were collected from 3,114 surveys filled by symptomatic patients RT-qPCR tested for SARS-CoV-2 in a single university centre in March-September 2020. The population demonstrated balanced sex and age with 759 SARS-CoV-2( +) patients. The most discriminative symptoms in SARS-CoV-2( +) patients at early infection stage were loss of taste/smell (OR = 3.33, p < 0.0001), body temperature above 38℃ (OR = 1.67, p < 0.0001), muscle aches (OR = 1.30, p = 0.0242), headache (OR = 1.27, p = 0.0405), cough (OR = 1.26, p = 0.0477). Dyspnea was more often reported among SARS-CoV-2(-) (OR = 0.55, p < 0.0001). Cough and dyspnea were 3.5 times more frequent among SARS-CoV-2(-) (OR = 0.28, p < 0.0001). Co-occurrence of cough, muscle aches, headache, loss of taste/smell (OR = 4.72, p = 0.0015) appeared significant, although co-occurrence of two symptoms only, cough and loss of smell or taste, means OR = 2.49 (p < 0.0001). Temperature > 38℃ with cough was most frequent in men (20%), while loss of taste/smell with cough in women (17%). For younger people, taste/smell impairment is sufficient to characterise infection, whereas in older patients co-occurrence of fever and cough is necessary. The presented study objectifies the single symptoms and interactions significance in COVID-19 diagnoses and demonstrates diverse symptomatology in patient groups.