COVID-19 Classification of X-ray Images Using Deep Neural Networks

Goldstein, E.; Keidar, D.; Yaron, D.; Shachar, Y.; Blass, A.; Charbinsky, L.; Aharony, I.; Lifshitz, L.; Lumelsky, D.; Neeman, Z.; Mizrachi, M.; Hajouj, M.; Eizenbach, N.; Sela, E.; Weiss, C.; Levin, P.; Benjaminov, O.; Bachar, G. N.; Tamir, S.; Rapson, Y.; Suhami, D.; dror, a. a.; Bogot, N.; Grubstein, A.; Shabsin, N.; Elyada, Y. M.; Eldar, Y.

In the midst of the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) outbreak, chest X-ray (CXR) imaging is playing an important role in the diagnosis and monitoring of patients with COVID-19. Machine learning solutions have been shown to be useful for X-ray analysis and classification in a range of medical contexts. The purpose of this study is to create and evaluate a machine learning model for diagnosis of COVID-19, and to provide a tool for searching for similar patients according to their X-ray scans. In this retrospective study, a classifier was built using a pre-trained deep learning model (ReNet50) and enhanced by data augmentation and lung segmentation to detect COVID-19 in frontal CXR images collected between January 2018 and July 2020 in four hospitals in Israel. A nearest-neighbors algorithm was implemented based on the network results that identifies the images most similar to a given image. The model was evaluated using accuracy, sensitivity, area under the curve (AUC) of receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve and of the precision-recall (P-R) curve. The dataset sourced for this study includes 2362 CXRs, balanced for positive and negative COVID-19, from 1384 patients (63 +/- 18 years, 552 men). Our model achieved 89.7% (314/350) accuracy and 87.1% (156/179) sensitivity in classification of COVID-19 on a test dataset comprising 15% (350 of 2326) of the original data, with AUC of ROC 0.95 and AUC of the P-R curve 0.94. For each image we retrieve images with the most similar DNN-based image embeddings; these can be used to compare with previous cases.