Virus patients’ scans to be stored on UAMS database

LITTLE ROCK — A University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences database will house all clinical images from U.S. coronavirus patients, including chest X-rays and CT scans, the academic medical center’s officials announced Tuesday.

UAMS also contributed the first de-identified scans from patients with covid-19, the illness caused by the coronavirus, to the collection, available online at www.cancerimagingarchive.net.

The same database, paid for by the National Cancer Institute at the National Institutes of Health, also hosts anonymized images and data on outcomes of cancer patients. Scientists can use such scans in their research and in analysis sometimes aided by artificial intelligence.

Fred Prior, chairman of the UAMS College of Medicine’s department of biomedical informatics and director of the project, said researchers are “clamoring” for such data in the pandemic. In their research, “we want to make sure the unique characteristics of our rural population in Arkansas are represented,” Prior said.

First records submitted by UAMS come from 105 patients and include chest X-rays and CT scans, some of which show organs beyond the lungs.

Emerging research on covid-19 in medical journals has documented the virus’ effects throughout the body, including in the kidneys, blood vessels and brain.

UAMS researchers also will collaborate with the cancer institute’s National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences to build a repository for covid-19 research, which will be cross-linked with the image archive.

Sixty-two institutions, including UAMS, will contribute data to the storehouse.

In addition to research, some doctors have proposed using scans to help diagnose covid-19. A February paper published in the journal Radiology found that chest CT scans could identify infections in 97% of a group of more than 1,000 patients studied in China.