Finding Covid-19 from Chest X-rays using Deep Learning on a Small Dataset
This addresses the problem of limited and slow COVID-19 testing for healthcare systems, though it is incremental due to the small dataset and lack of disease stage information.
The paper tackled diagnosing COVID-19 from chest X-rays using a pretrained deep convolutional neural network on a small dataset, achieving an AUC of 0.997 with all 102 COVID-19 cases correctly classified in validation and 20 unseen cases correctly classified in testing.
Testing for COVID-19 has been unable to keep up with the demand. Further, the false negative rate is projected to be as high as 30% and test results can take some time to obtain. X-ray machines are widely available and provide images for diagnosis quickly. This paper explores how useful chest X-ray images can be in diagnosing COVID-19 disease. We have obtained 122 chest X-rays of COVID-19 and over 4,000 chest X-rays of viral and bacterial pneumonia. A pretrained deep convolutional neural network has been tuned on 102 COVID-19 cases and 102 other pneumonia cases in a 10-fold cross validation. The results were all 102 COVID-19 cases were correctly classified and there were 8 false positives resulting in an AUC of 0.997. On a test set of 20 unseen COVID-19 cases all were correctly classified and more than 95% of 4171 other pneumonia examples were correctly classified. This study has flaws, most critically a lack of information about where in the disease process the COVID-19 cases were and the small data set size. More COVID-19 case images will enable a better answer to the question of how useful chest X-rays can be for diagnosing COVID-19 (so please send them).