April 8th 2020
In the wake of the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic, requests for chest X-rays have suffered a considerable increase as they became critical in the management of the patients affected by the disease. As a result, many diagnostic radiology services are overstretched and unable to report all the chest x-rays generated daily. As stressed by the Spanish Society of Medical Radiology (SERAM) and other radiology societies around the world, chest X-rays should always be reported by radiologists since they are the ones with the ability to do so. Otherwise, health care quality deteriorates when they are evaluated by non-experts.
However, the current public health emergency has forced residents and doctors from other specialties, as well as medical students in their final year, to man the emergencies and the floors of many hospitals, thus having to perform the diagnosis of chest X-rays. Of these doctors, many are unfamiliar with the diagnosis of viral pneumonias on chest X-rays, as it is not part of their usual work. Even for thoracic radiologists,the diagnosis of viral pneumonia on chest X-rays presents a variable difficulty, from simple cases to very difficult ones, so it is a great challenge for non-radiologist to perform this task whether they are familiar with it or not.
Aware of this problem, the Advanced Computing and e-Science group at IFCA, together with three Radiodiagnosis residents from the Marqués de Valdecilla University Hospital, have developed a free web application for intended to help training students and physicians of any specialty in the diagnosis of COVID-19 on chest X-rays. In order to follow the training evolution, the application calculates the sensitivity, specificity and predictive values of the user identification of pathological images compatible with COVID-19 versus pathological images not compatible with COVID-19 and non-pathological images.
Currently, it is one of the online platforms with more examples of COVID-19 patient radiographies and in the few hours it has been available it is already used by 70 users:
https://xray.covid.ifca.es
We are looking for maximum diffusion so that it can help as many colleagues as possible. A mobile version will soon be published and an english version will also be launched to increase its diffusion.
