Explainable COVID-19 Detection Using Chest CT Scans and Deep Learning.
Hammam AlshazlyChristoph LinseErhardt BarthThomas MartinetzPublished in: Sensors (Basel, Switzerland) (2021)
This paper explores how well deep learning models trained on chest CT images can diagnose COVID-19 infected people in a fast and automated process. To this end, we adopted advanced deep network architectures and proposed a transfer learning strategy using custom-sized input tailored for each deep architecture to achieve the best performance. We conducted extensive sets of experiments on two CT image datasets, namely, the SARS-CoV-2 CT-scan and the COVID19-CT. The results show superior performances for our models compared with previous studies. Our best models achieved average accuracy, precision, sensitivity, specificity, and F1-score values of 99.4%, 99.6%, 99.8%, 99.6%, and 99.4% on the SARS-CoV-2 dataset, and 92.9%, 91.3%, 93.7%, 92.2%, and 92.5% on the COVID19-CT dataset, respectively. For better interpretability of the results, we applied visualization techniques to provide visual explanations for the models' predictions. Feature visualizations of the learned features show well-separated clusters representing CT images of COVID-19 and non-COVID-19 cases. Moreover, the visualizations indicate that our models are not only capable of identifying COVID-19 cases but also provide accurate localization of the COVID-19-associated regions, as indicated by well-trained radiologists.
Keyphrases
- sars cov
- coronavirus disease
- deep learning
- computed tomography
- dual energy
- image quality
- contrast enhanced
- respiratory syndrome coronavirus
- positron emission tomography
- convolutional neural network
- magnetic resonance imaging
- artificial intelligence
- machine learning
- rna seq
- high throughput
- structural basis
- sensitive detection