Diagnosis of Coronavirus Disease 2019 Pneumonia by Using Chest Radiography: Value of Artificial Intelligence

Background: Radiologists are proficient in differentiating between chest radiographs with and without symptoms of pneumonia but have found it more challenging to differentiate coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pneumonia from non-COVID-19 pneumonia on chest radiographs. Purpose: To develop an artificial intelligence algorithm to differentiate COVID-19 pneumonia from other causes of abnormalities at chest radiography. Materials and Methods: In this retrospective study, a deep neural network, CV19- Net, was trained, validated, and tested on chest radiographs in patients with and without COVID-19 pneumonia. For the chest radiographs positive for COVID-19, patients with reverse transcription polymerase chain reaction results positive for severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 with findings positive for pneumonia between February 1, 2020, and May 30, 2020, were included. For the non-COVID-19 chest radiographs, patients with pneumonia who underwent chest radiography between October 1, 2019, and December 31, 2019, were included. Area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUC), sensitivity, and specificity were calculated to characterize diagnostic performance. To benchmark the performance of CV19-Net, a randomly sampled test data set composed of 500 chest radiographs in 500 patients was evaluated by the CV19-Net and three experienced thoracic radiologists. Results: A total of 2060 patients (5806 chest radiographs; mean age, 62 years +/- 16 [standard deviation]; 1059 men) with COVID-19 pneumonia and 3148 patients (5300 chest radiographs; mean age, 64 years 6 18; 1578 men) with non-COVID-19 pneumonia were included and split into training and validation and test data sets. For the test set, CV19-Net achieved an AUC of 0.92 (95% CI: 0.91, 0.93). This corresponded to a sensitivity of 88% (95% CI: 87, 89) and a specificity of 79% (95% CI: 77, 80) by using a high-sensitivity operating threshold, or a sensitivity of 78% (95% CI: 77, 79) and a specificity of 89% (95% CI: 88, 90) by using a high-specificity operating threshold. For the 500 sampled chest radiographs, CV19-Net achieved an AUC of 0.94 (95% CI: 0.93, 0.96) compared with an AUC of 0.85 (95% CI: 0.81, 0.88) achieved by radiologists. Conclusion: CV19-Net was able to differentiate coronavirus disease 2019-related pneumonia from other types of pneumonia, with performance exceeding that of experienced thoracic radiologists. (C) RSNA. 2021

Automated summary

The study aimed to differentiate COVID-19 pneumonia from other causes of abnormalities on chest radiographs using an artificial intelligence algorithm. The results showed that CV19-Net was effective in distinguishing between different types of pneumonia, outperforming experienced thoracic radiologists.