Artificial intelligence for the detection of COVID-19 pneumonia on chest CT using multinational datasets

Abstract

Chest CT is emerging as a valuable diagnostic tool for clinical management of COVID-19 associated lung disease. Artificial intelligence (AI) has the potential to aid in rapid evaluation of CT scans for differentiation of COVID-19 findings from other clinical entities. Here we show that a series of deep learning algorithms, trained in a diverse multinational cohort of 1280 patients to localize parietal pleura/lung parenchyma followed by classification of COVID-19 pneumonia, can achieve up to 90.8% accuracy, with 84% sensitivity and 93% specificity, as evaluated in an independent test set (not included in training and validation) of 1337 patients. Normal controls included chest CTs from oncology, emergency, and pneumonia-related indications. The false positive rate in 140 patients with laboratory confirmed other (non COVID-19) pneumonias was 10%. AI-based algorithms can readily identify CT scans with COVID-19 associated pneumonia, as well as distinguish non-COVID related pneumonias with high specificity in diverse patient populations.

Read full text: Harmon, S.A., Sanford, T.H., Xu, S. et al. Artificial intelligence for the detection of COVID-19 pneumonia on chest CT using multinational datasets. Nat Commun 11, 4080 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-020-17971-2



Keywords: artificial intelligence, detection of COVID-19 pneumonia, chest CT, deep learning algorithms, lung disease, clinical management of COVID-19, #ArtificialIntelligence, #AI.