Document Type

Article

Publication Date

12-2020

Publication Source

AI

Abstract

The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) global pandemic has severely impacted lives across the globe. Respiratory disorders in COVID-19 patients are caused by lung opacities similar to viral pneumonia. A Computer-Aided Detection (CAD) system for the detection of COVID-19 using chest radiographs would provide a second opinion for radiologists. For this research, we utilize publicly available datasets that have been marked by radiologists into two-classes (COVID-19 and non-COVID-19). We address the class imbalance problem associated with the training dataset by proposing a novel transfer-to-transfer learning approach, where we break a highly imbalanced training dataset into a group of balanced mini-sets and apply transfer learning between these. We demonstrate the efficacy of the method using well-established deep convolutional neural networks. Our proposed training mechanism is more robust to limited training data and class imbalance. We study the performance of our algorithm(s) based on 10-fold cross validation and two hold-out validation experiments to demonstrate its efficacy. We achieved an overall sensitivity of 0.94 for the hold-out validation experiments containing 2265 and 2139 marked as COVID-19 chest radiographs, respectively. For the 10-fold cross validation experiment, we achieve an overall Area under the Receiver Operating Characteristic curve (AUC) value of 0.996 for COVID-19 detection. This paper serves as a proof-of-concept that an automated detection approach can be developed with a limited set of COVID-19 images, and in areas with scarcity of trained radiologists.

Inclusive pages

539-557

ISBN/ISSN

2673-2688

Document Version

Published Version

Comments

This open-access article is provided for download in compliance with the publisher’s policy on self-archiving. To view the version of record, use the DOI: https://doi.org/10.3390/ai1040032

Publisher

MDPI

Volume

1

Peer Reviewed

yes

Issue

4


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