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Open Imaging Index
MRI Brain

Mount Sinai COVID-19 Neuroimaging, Cancer vs Non-Cancer

Neuroimaging findings and neurological manifestations in hospitalized COVID-19 patients: Impact of cancer and ventilatory support status

Clinical brain MRI of adults hospitalized with COVID-19 and neurological symptoms at Mount Sinai, New York, in four groups of 20 by cancer and ventilatory support status, read by neuroradiologists for infarcts, hemorrhages and hyperintensities. Images are not shared.

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Overview

This entry describes the brain MRI cohort of a retrospective observational study at the Mount Sinai Health System in New York City. The study asked whether a pre-existing non-CNS cancer, or the need for ventilatory support, changes the neurological symptoms and brain MRI findings of patients hospitalized with COVID-19. Patients were drawn at random from those admitted between March 2020 and April 2021 who had neurological manifestations and a clinical brain MRI. The images are not released. The paper's supplement holds only group-level counts.

Composition

The cohort has 80 adults (44 male, 36 female, mean age 64.5 years, SD 14) with RT-PCR confirmed COVID-19. By design it has four groups of 20: cancer with ventilatory support, cancer without, no cancer with ventilatory support, and no cancer without. Ventilatory support covered both intubation and non-invasive ventilation. The cancer groups mixed many non-CNS tumor types. The most frequent clinical diagnosis was encephalopathy, in 62 patients.

Acquisition

All scans are routine clinical MRI from several hospitals of the health system, so protocols varied. The typical exam was at 1.5 T with axial T2-weighted, axial T2 FLAIR, axial gradient echo, sagittal T1-weighted and diffusion-weighted imaging with ADC maps. MRI took place on average 13.2 days (SD 14.1) after the COVID-19 diagnosis. Scanner vendors are not reported.

Annotations

Three fellowship-trained neuroradiologists and a senior resident read the scans in blinded pairs, without knowledge of cancer or ventilation status, and the three neuroradiologists settled disagreements by consensus. Findings were rated visually: non-ischemic T2/FLAIR hyperintensities (29 patients), acute or subacute infarcts (21), chronic infarcts (20), microhemorrhages (19), chronic macrohemorrhages (8), acute macrohemorrhages (6) and encephalitis-like patterns (6). Twenty-six patients had no relevant finding. Neurological diagnoses were abstracted from the medical record and confirmed by a neurologist.

Known limitations

  • No images, per-patient reads or derived data are shared, and no terms for them are published.
  • The sample is small and has no COVID-negative control group.
  • The interval from diagnosis to MRI was long and variable, often because ventilated patients had to be stabilized first.
  • Exact sequences and field strength varied between hospitals.

Cohort

Aggregate numbers from the sources below. Bars are relative to the 80 subjects.

Sex

  • Female 36 45%
  • Male 44 55%

Results in McCarthy et al. 2023, PLoS ONE 18(3):e0283614

Country

  • United States 80 100%

Methods: Patient population in McCarthy et al. 2023, PLoS ONE 18(3):e0283614

Condition

Groups can overlap

  • COVID-19 80 100%
  • Cancer 40 50%
  • Ischemic stroke 21 26%
  • Cerebral microbleeds 19 24%
  • Intracranial hemorrhage 6 8%

Methods: Patient population, Results, Table 2 in McCarthy et al. 2023, PLoS ONE 18(3):e0283614

License and access

Our reading of the license, not legal advice. Before you use the data, read the original license and confirm that your use is allowed. We take no responsibility for how you use a dataset. Full disclaimer

Access
Not shared

The data are not available outside the institution or study that holds them

The data availability statement says all relevant data are within the paper and its supporting information. The only supplement (S1 Dataset) is a spreadsheet of group-level counts and Fisher's exact tests, and the PLOS figshare record holds Table 2 of the paper. No images or per-patient data are released.

Access page

No published license or data use terms

The data holder has published no license and no data use terms. Any use, sharing or commercial right has to be agreed with the data holder, and nothing can be assumed to be allowed. Default copyright and data protection law still apply.

No license or data use terms are published for the images. The CC BY 4.0 license of the article and its supplement covers only the published text, tables and summary spreadsheet.

Original license text Checked 2026-10-08

What you can do

  • Commercial use Not stated
  • Not stated
  • Train ML models Not stated
  • Create derived data Not stated
  • Publish results Not stated

What you can share

  • Share the data Not stated
  • Share derived data Not stated
  • Share trained models Not stated

What you must do

  • Cite or credit Not stated
  • Share alike Not stated
  • Sign an agreement Not stated
  • Ethics approval Not stated
  • Manuscript review Not stated
  • Release code Not stated
  • Return results Not stated
  • Delete after use Not stated

Limits

  • No re-identification Not stated
  • Location limits Not stated

Citation

McCarthy L, Khegai O, Goldstein J, Belani P, Pawha P, Kihira S, et al. (2023) Neuroimaging findings and neurological manifestations in hospitalized COVID-19 patients: Impact of cancer and ventilatory support status. PLoS ONE 18(3): e0283614. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0283614

Sources

Every number on this page comes from one of these documents. Each chart names the table or page it is taken from. The raw numbers are in stats.csv.