French Imaging Database Against Coronavirus (FIDAC): A large COVID-19 multi-center chest CT database

Purpose: During the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic, the French Society of Radiology and the French College of Radiology, in partnership with NEHS Digital, have set up a system to collect chest computed tomography (CT) examinations with clinical, virological and radiological metadata, from patients clinically suspected of COVID-19 pneumonia. This allowed the constitution of an anonymized multicenter database, named FIDAC (French Imaging Database Against Coronavirus). The aim of this report was to describe the con-tent of this public database.Materials and methods: Twenty-two French radiology centers participated to the data collection. The data col-lected were chest CT examinations in DICOM format associated with the following metadata: patient age and sex, originating facility identifier, originating facility region, time from symptom onset to CT examination, indication for CT examination, reverse transcription-polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR) results and normal-ized CT report performed by a senior radiologist. All the data were anonymized and sent through a NEHS Dig-ital system to a centralized data center.Results: A total of 5944 patients were included from the 22 centers aggregated into 8 regions with a mean number of patients of 743 +/- 603.3 [SD] per region (range: 102-1577 patients). Reasons for CT examination and normalized CT reports were provided for all patients. RT-PCR results were provided in 5574 patients (93.77%) with a positive result of RT-PCR in 44.6% of patients.Conclusion: The FIDAC project allowed the creation of a large database of chest CT images and metadata avail-able, under conditions, in open access through the CERF-SFR website.(c) 2022 Societe francaise de radiologie. Published by Elsevier Masson SAS. All rights reserved.