Differentiating COVID-19 from other types of pneumonia with convolutional neural networks

This article has been Reviewed by the following groups

Read the full article See related articles

Discuss this preprint

Start a discussion What are Sciety discussions?

Abstract

INTRODUCTION

A widely-used method for diagnosing COVID-19 is the nucleic acid test based on real-time reverse transcriptase-polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR). However, the sensitivity of real time RT-PCR tests is low and it can take up to 8 hours to receive the test results. Radiologic methods can provide higher sensitivity. The aim of this study is to investigate the use of X-ray and convolutional neural networks for the diagnosis of COVID-19 and to differentiate it from viral and/or bacterial pneumonia, as 2-class (bacterial pneumonia vs COVID-19 and viral pneumonia vs COVID-19) and 3- class (bacterial pneumonia, COVID-19, and healthy group (BCH), and among viral pneumonia, COVID- 19, and healthy group (VCH)) experiments.

METHODS

225 COVID-19, 1,583 healthy control, 2,780 bacterial pneumonia, and 1,493 viral pneumonia chest X-ray images were used. 2-class- and 3-class-experiments were performed with different convolutional neural network (ConvNet) architectures, with different variations of convolutional layers and fully-connected layers.

RESULTS

The results showed that bacterial pneumonia vs COVID-19 and viral pneumonia vs COVID- 19 reached a mean ROC AUC of 97.32% and 96.80%, respectively. In the 3-class-experiments, macro-average F1 scores of 95.79% and 94.59% were obtained in terms of detecting COVID-19 among BCH and VCH, respectively.

CONCLUSIONS

The ConvNet was able to distinguish the COVID-19 images among non-COVID-19 images, namely bacterial and viral pneumonia as well as normal X-ray images.

Article activity feed

  1. SciScore for 10.1101/2020.05.26.20113761: (What is this?)

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

    Table 1: Rigor

    Institutional Review Board StatementIRB: The project built for creating this dataset was approved by the University of Montreal’s Ethics Committee
    Consent: Informed consent was obtained for all subjects, and the study was approved by the relevant institutional review board at each data acquisition site.
    RandomizationA total of 15 images randomly selected from all classes were assigned as the validation set.
    Blindingnot detected.
    Power Analysisnot detected.
    Sex as a biological variableBased on the provided information, there were 131 male patients and 64 female patients, and the average age for the COVID-19 group was 58.8±14.9 years. 1,583 healthy control, 2,780 bacterial pneumonia, and 1,493 viral pneumonia chest X-ray images were obtained from [17].

    Table 2: Resources

    No key resources detected.


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


    Results from LimitationRecognizer: An explicit section about the limitations of the techniques employed in this study was not found. We encourage authors to address study limitations.

    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: We did not find any issues relating to colormaps.


    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

    SciScore is an automated tool that is designed to assist expert reviewers by finding and presenting formulaic information scattered throughout a paper in a standard, easy to digest format. SciScore checks for the presence and correctness of RRIDs (research resource identifiers), and for rigor criteria such as sex and investigator blinding. For details on the theoretical underpinning of rigor criteria and the tools shown here, including references cited, please follow this link.