Screening COVID-19 Based on CT/CXR Images & Building a Publicly Available CT-scan Dataset of COVID-19

TL;DR

This paper introduces a large publicly available CT-scan dataset for COVID-19 screening and proposes deep learning models for detecting COVID-19 from CT and CXR images, achieving high accuracy.

Contribution

It provides the first large-scale COVID-19 CT dataset and develops deep learning models for screening using CT and CXR images with transfer learning.

Findings

Achieved AUC of 0.886 with CT images

Achieved AUC of 0.984 with CXR images

Demonstrated effectiveness of transfer learning for CXR screening

Abstract

The rapid outbreak of COVID-19 threatens humans life all around the world. Due to insufficient diagnostic infrastructures, developing an accurate, efficient, inexpensive, and quick diagnostic tool is of great importance. As chest radiography, such as chest X-ray (CXR) and CT computed tomography (CT), is a possible way for screening COVID-19, developing an automatic image classification tool is immensely helpful for detecting the patients with COVID-19. To date, researchers have proposed several different screening methods; however, none of them could achieve a reliable and highly sensitive performance yet. The main drawbacks of current methods are the lack of having enough training data, low generalization performance, and a high rate of false-positive detection. To tackle such limitations, this study firstly builds a large-size publicly available CT-scan dataset, consisting of more than 13k CT-images of more than 1000 individuals, in which 8k images are taken from 500 patients infected with COVID-19. Secondly, we propose a deep learning model for screening COVID-19 using our proposed CT dataset and report the baseline results. Finally, we extend the proposed CT model for screening COVID-19 from CXR images using a transfer learning approach. The experimental results show that the proposed CT and CXR methods achieve the AUC scores of 0.886 and 0.984 respectively.