COVID-Classifier: an automated machine learning model to assist in the diagnosis of COVID-19 infection in chest X-ray images

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Abstract

Chest-X ray (CXR) radiography can be used as a first-line triage process for non-COVID-19 patients with pneumonia. However, the similarity between features of CXR images of COVID-19 and pneumonia caused by other infections makes the differential diagnosis by radiologists challenging. We hypothesized that machine learning-based classifiers can reliably distinguish the CXR images of COVID-19 patients from other forms of pneumonia. We used a dimensionality reduction method to generate a set of optimal features of CXR images to build an efficient machine learning classifier that can distinguish COVID-19 cases from non-COVID-19 cases with high accuracy and sensitivity. By using global features of the whole CXR images, we successfully implemented our classifier using a relatively small dataset of CXR images. We propose that our COVID-Classifier can be used in conjunction with other tests for optimal allocation of hospital resources by rapid triage of non-COVID-19 cases.

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  1. SciScore for 10.1101/2020.05.09.20096560: (What is this?)

    Please note, not all rigor criteria are appropriate for all manuscripts.

    Table 1: Rigor

    NIH rigor criteria are not applicable to paper type.

    Table 2: Resources

    Software and Algorithms
    SentencesResources
    This resource is fully open-source, providing users with Python codes used in preparing image datasets, feature extraction, feature evaluation, training the ML model, and evaluation of the trained ML model.
    Python
    suggested: (IPython, RRID:SCR_001658)

    Results from OddPub: Thank you for sharing your code and data.


    Results from LimitationRecognizer: We detected the following sentences addressing limitations in the study:
    Despite the encouraging results, we recognize that this study has a few limitations. First, our CXR dataset has a relatively small size. A larger dataset consisting of the cases from different institutions would be useful to further verify the reliability and robustness of our proposed model. Second, in our future work, we will investigate different feature selection and feature reduction methods such as DNE [20], Relief [21], LPP [5], Fast-ICA [22], recursive feature elimination [23], variable ranking techniques [24], or combining them with our feature reduction approach. Third, this study used a neural network-based classifier that can solve complex problems and get adapted well to high dimensional data. However, there may exist needs to explore other effective classifiers such as SVM [25], GLM [26], Random Forest [27].

    Results from TrialIdentifier: No clinical trial numbers were referenced.


    Results from Barzooka: We did not find any issues relating to the usage of bar graphs.


    Results from JetFighter: Please consider improving the rainbow (“jet”) colormap(s) used on pages 10 and 3. At least one figure is not accessible to readers with colorblindness and/or is not true to the data, i.e. not perceptually uniform.


    Results from rtransparent:
    • Thank you for including a conflict of interest statement. Authors are encouraged to include this statement when submitting to a journal.
    • Thank you for including a funding statement. Authors are encouraged to include this statement when submitting to a journal.
    • No protocol registration statement was detected.

    About SciScore

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