COVIDx-US: An Open-Access Benchmark Dataset of Ultrasound Imaging Data for AI-Driven COVID-19 Analytics.

Background: The Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic continues to have a devastating effect on the health and well-being of the global population. Apart from the global health crises, the pandemic has also caused significant economic and financial difficulties and socio-physiological implications. Effective screening, triage, treatment planning, and prognostication of outcome play a key role in controlling the pandemic. Recent studies have highlighted the role of point-of-care ultrasound imaging for COVID-19 screening and prognosis, particularly given that it is non-invasive, globally available, and easy-to-sanitize. COVIDx-US Dataset: Motivated by these attributes and the promise of artificial intelligence tools to aid clinicians, we introduce COVIDx-US, an open-access benchmark dataset of COVID-19 related ultrasound imaging data. The COVIDx-US dataset was curated from multiple data sources and its current version, i.e., v1.5., consists of 173 ultrasound videos and 21,570 processed images across 147 patients with COVID-19 infection, non-COVID-19 infection, other lung diseases/conditions, as well as normal control cases.

Conclusions: The COVIDx-US dataset was released as part of a large open-source initiative, the COVID-Net initiative, and will be continuously growing, as more data sources become available. To the best of the authors' knowledge, COVIDx-US is the first and largest open-access fully-curated benchmark lung ultrasound imaging dataset that contains a standardized and unified lung ultrasound score per video file, providing better interpretation while enabling other research avenues such as severity assessment. In addition, the dataset is reproducible, easy-to-use, and easy-to-scale thanks to the well-documented modular design.