Research Area:  Machine Learning

Abstract:

The outbreak of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus 2 (SARS-COV-2) has caused more than 26 million cases of Corona virus disease (COVID-19) in the world so far. To control the spread of the disease, screening large numbers of suspected cases for appropriate quarantine and treatment are a priority. Pathogenic laboratory testing is typically the gold standard, but it bears the burden of significant false negativity, adding to the urgent need of alternative diagnostic methods to combat the disease. Based on COVID-19 radiographic changes in CT images, this study hypothesized that artificial intelligence methods might be able to extract specific graphical features of COVID-19 and provide a clinical diagnosis ahead of the pathogenic test, thus saving critical time for disease control.We collected 1065 CT images of pathogen-confirmed COVID-19 cases along with those previously diagnosed with typical viral pneumonia. We modified the inception transfer-learning model to establish the algorithm, followed by internal and external validation.The internal validation achieved a total accuracy of 89.5% with a specificity of 0.88 and sensitivity of 0.87. The external testing dataset showed a total accuracy of 79.3% with a specificity of 0.83 and sensitivity of 0.67. In addition, in 54 COVID-19 images, the first two nucleic acid test results were negative, and 46 were predicted as COVID-19 positive by the algorithm, with an accuracy of 85.2%. These results demonstrate the proof-of-principle for using artificial intelligence to extract radiological features for timely and accurate COVID-19 diagnosis.

Keywords:  

Author(s) Name:  Shuai Wang, Bo Kang, Jinlu Ma, Xianjun Zeng, Mingming Xiao, Jia Guo, Mengjiao Cai, Jingyi Yang, Yaodong Li, Xiangfei Meng & Bo Xu

Publisher name:  Springer

DOI:  10.1007/s00330-021-07715-1

Volume Information:  volume 31, pages: 6096–6104

Paper Link:   https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00330-021-07715-1