Title
COVID-19 diagnosis from chest x-rays: developing a simple, fast, and accurate neural network
Abstract
Purpose Chest x-rays are a fast and inexpensive test that may potentially diagnose COVID-19, the disease caused by the novel coronavirus. However, chest imaging is not a first-line test for COVID-19 due to low diagnostic accuracy and confounding with other viral pneumonias. Recent research using deep learning may help overcome this issue as convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have demonstrated high accuracy of COVID-19 diagnosis at an early stage. Methods We used the COVID-19 Radiography database [36], which contains x-ray images of COVID-19, other viral pneumonia, and normal lungs. We developed a CNN in which we added a dense layer on top of a pre-trained baseline CNN (EfficientNetB0), and we trained, validated, and tested the model on 15,153 X-ray images. We used data augmentation to avoid overfitting and address class imbalance; we used fine-tuning to improve the model's performance. From the external test dataset, we calculated the model's accuracy, sensitivity, specificity, positive predictive value, negative predictive value, and F1-score. Results Our model differentiated COVID-19 from normal lungs with 95% accuracy, 90% sensitivity, and 97% specificity; it differentiated COVID-19 from other viral pneumonia and normal lungs with 93% accuracy, 94% sensitivity, and 95% specificity. Conclusions Our parsimonious CNN shows that it is possible to differentiate COVID-19 from other viral pneumonia and normal lungs on x-ray images with high accuracy. Our method may assist clinicians with making more accurate diagnostic decisions and support chest X-rays as a valuable screening tool for the early, rapid diagnosis of COVID-19.
Year
DOI
Venue
2021
10.1007/s13755-021-00166-4
HEALTH INFORMATION SCIENCE AND SYSTEMS
Keywords
DocType
Volume
COVID-19, Chest x-rays, Artificial intelligence, Deep learning, Classification, Convolution Neural Network
Journal
9
Issue
ISSN
Citations 
1
2047-2501
0
PageRank 
References 
Authors
0.34
0
5
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Vasilis Nikolaou100.34
Sebastiano Massaro200.34
Masoud Fakhimi300.34
Lampros Stergioulas400.34
Wolfgang Garn500.34