Eliminating Indefiniteness of Clinical Spectrum for Better Screening COVID-19.

Guo, Guangyu; Liu, Zhuoyan; Zhao, Shijie; Guo, Lei; Liu, Tianming

The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) has swept all over the world in the last few months. Due to the limited detection facilities and medical resources, especially in developing countries, a large number of suspected cases can only receive common clinical diagnosis rather than more effective detections like Reverse Transcription Polymerase Chain Reaction (RT-PCR) tests or CT scans. This motivates us to develop a quick screening method on suspected patients via common clinical diagnosis results. However, the diagnostic items of different patients may vary greatly and there is a huge variation in the dimension of the diagnosis data among different suspected patients, which makes it hard to process these indefinite dimension data via classical classification algorithms. To resolve this problem, we propose an Indefiniteness Elimination Network (IE-Net) to eliminate the influence of the varied dimensions and make predictions about the COVID-19 cases. The IENet is in an encoder-decoder framework fashion and an indefiniteness elimination operation is proposed to transfer the indefinite dimension feature into a fixed dimension feature. Comprehensive experiments were conducted on the public available COVID-19 Clinical Spectrum dataset. Experimental results show that the proposed indefiniteness elimination operation greatly improves the classification performance and the IE-Net achieves 94.80% accuracy and 92.79% recall for distinguishing COVID-19 cases from nonCOVID-19 cases with only common clinical diagnose data. We further compared our methods with 3 classical classification algorithms: random forest, gradient boosting and multi-layer perceptron (MLP). Compared with traditional classification methods, the proposed IE-Net can bring at least 9.40% accuracy gains and 12.17% recall gains. To explore the specificity of each clinical test item, we further analyzed the possible relationship between each clinical test item and COVID-19. In general, we proposed a novel image complementary method for COVID-19 screening and will be of great help for areas where effective detections are not available.