Deep Learning-Based Recognizing COVID-19 and other Common Infectious Diseases of the Lung by Chest CT Scan Images

Purpose COVID-19 has become global threaten. CT acts as an important method of diagnosis. However, human–based interpretation of CT imaging is time consuming. More than that, substantial inter-observer-variation cannot be ignored. We aim at developing a diagnostic tool for artificial intelligence (AI)–based classification of CT images for recognizing COVID-19 and other common infectious diseases of the lung. Experimental Design In this study, images were retrospectively collected and prospectively analyzed using machine learning. CT scan images of the lung that show or do not show COVID-19 were used to train and validate a classification framework based on convolutional neural network. Five conditions including COVID-19 pneumonia, non-COVID-19 viral pneumonia, bacterial pneumonia, pulmonary tuberculosis, and normal lung were evaluated. Training and validation set of images were collected from Wuhan Jin Yin-Tan Hospital whereas test set of images were collected from Zhongshan Hospital Xiamen University and the fifth Hospital of Wuhan. Results Accuracy, sensitivity, and specificity of the AI framework were reported. For test dataset, accuracies for recognizing normal lung, COVID-19 pneumonia, non-COVID-19 viral pneumonia, bacterial pneumonia, and pulmonary tuberculosis were 99.4%, 98.8%, 98.5%, 98.3%, and 98.6%, respectively. For the test dataset, accuracy, sensitivity, specificity, PPV, and NPV of recognizing COVID-19 were 98.8%, 98.2%, 98.9%, 94.5%, and 99.7%, respectively. Conclusions The performance of the proposed AI framework has excellent performance of recognizing COVID-19 and other common infectious diseases of the lung, which also has balanced sensitivity and specificity.