STTR Phase I: AI-assisted Assessment, Tracking, and Reporting of COVID-19 Severity on Chest CT

The broader impact /commercial potential of this Small Business Technology Transfer (STTR) Phase I project is to leverage artificial intelligence (AI) to reduce errors and improve accuracy, standardization, agreement, and reporting in evaluation of COVID-19 lung disease severity on chest computed tomography (CT) images. Chest CT procedures play a critical role in COVID-19 patients but current methods for evaluating chest CT images lack accurate, quantitative, or consistent information, leading to text-based reports that are difficult to interpret. The proposed AI-assisted COVID-19 chest CT workflow will efficiently capture the fraction of lung involvement and improve communication with clinicians by providing a standardized graphical report, key images of important findings, and structured text. The quantitative data will standardize reporting on an individual patient basis and provide data for population-level analyses, thereby offering the potential to significantly advance scientific knowledge of COVID-19 lung disease on a national level. This STTR Phase I project proposes to develop an AI-assisted COVID-19 chest CT workflow to rapidly and objectively quantify the percentage of lung involvement, classify lung involvement using the COVID-19 Reporting and Data System (CO-RADS), track common and uncommon COVID-19 lung findings, and automatically generate summary reports with a graph, key images, and structured text. The standard-of-care for assessing and reporting COVID-19 lung disease severity on chest CT images involves dictated text-based reports that are subjective, highly variable, inefficient to generate and interpret, prone to errors, incomplete, and qualitative with data provided in an unstandardized format. The proposed AI-assisted COVID-19 chest CT workflow will reduce interpretation errors and omissions and improve accuracy, standardization, inter-observer agreement, efficiency, and reporting in evaluation of COVID-19 disease severity and response to treatment. This project will validate the working prototype with a team of expert clinicians. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.