Setting up an Easy-to-Use Machine Learning Pipeline for Medical Decision Support: A Case Study for COVID-19 Diagnosis Based on Deep Learning with CT Scans.

Sakagianni, Aikaterini; Feretzakis, Georgios; Kalles, Dimitris; Koufopoulou, Christina; Kaldis, Vasileios

Coronavirus disease (COVID-19) constitutes an ongoing global health problem with significant morbidity and mortality. It usually presents characteristic findings on a chest CT scan, which may lead to early detection of the disease. A timely and accurate diagnosis of COVID-19 is the cornerstone for the prompt management of the patients. The aim of the present study was to evaluate the performance of an automated machine learning algorithm in the diagnosis of Covid-19 pneumonia using chest CT scans. Diagnostic performance was assessed by the area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUC), sensitivity, and positive predictive value. The method's average precision was 0.932. We suggest that auto-ML platforms help users with limited ML expertise train image recognition models by only uploading the examined dataset and performing some basic settings. Such methods could deliver significant potential benefits for patients in the future by allowing for earlier disease detection and care.