Enrichment of the NLST and NSCLC-Radiomics computed tomography
  collections with AI-derived annotations
Deepa Krishnaswamy Dennis Bontempi Vamsi Thiriveedhi Davide Punzo David Clunie Christopher P Bridge Hugo JWL Aerts Ron Kikinis Andrey Fedorov
Public imaging datasets are critical for the development and evaluation of
automated tools in cancer imaging. Unfortunately, many do not include
annotations or image-derived features, complicating their downstream analysis.
Artificial intelligence-based annotation tools have been shown to achieve
acceptable performance and thus can be used to automatically annotate large
datasets. As part of the effort to enrich public data available within NCI
Imaging Data Commons (IDC), here we introduce AI-generated annotations for two
collections of computed tomography images of the chest, NSCLC-Radiomics, and
the National Lung Screening Trial. Using publicly available AI algorithms we
derived volumetric annotations of thoracic organs at risk, their corresponding
radiomics features, and slice-level annotations of anatomical landmarks and
regions. The resulting annotations are publicly available within IDC, where the
DICOM format is used to harmonize the data and achieve FAIR principles. The
annotations are accompanied by cloud-enabled notebooks demonstrating their use.
This study reinforces the need for large, publicly accessible curated datasets
and demonstrates how AI can be used to aid in cancer imaging.