The Effects of AI in COVID-19 Diagnosis

For diseases like COVID-19, fast diagnosis saves lives, limits the spread of the disease and It is crucial to stopping a pandemic early or slowing it down until a vaccine is created. Covid-19 affects each patient differently where some need severe care and some don’t. Being able to forecast who will be affected more, can severely help in targeting assistance and planning medical resource allocation. Yan et al. (2020) used Machine Learning to develop a prognostic prediction algorithm to predict the mortality risk of a person that has been infected, using data from (only) 29 patients at Tongji Hospital in Wuhan, China. Unfortunately, since it only has 29 training samples, accuracy is questionable.

CT features of COVID-19 by disease severity

CT can detect certain characteristic manifestations in the lung associated with COVID-19, which means you can use CT as a diagnosis of COVID-19. However, CT may share certain similar imaging features between COVID-19 and other types of pneumonia, thus making it difficult to differentiate them. In a study carried out by the Radiology department in China, a three-dimensional deep learning model was designed and evaluated for detecting coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) from chest CT images. This deep learning framework was referred to as COVNet. COVNet took a series of CT slices as input and generated features for the corresponding slices. The extracted features from all slices are then combined by a max-pooling operation which would output a feature map containing the most prominent features of the previous feature map. The final feature map is fed to a fully connected layer and the softmax activation function to generate a probability score for each type (COVID-19, CAP, and non-pneumonia).

References:

Naudé, W. (2020). Artificial Intelligence Against Covid-19: An Early Review. Retrieved 3 June 2020, from https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3568314

Artificial Intelligence Distinguishes COVID-19 from Community-Acquired Pneumonia on Chest CT | Radiology. (2020). Radiology. Retrieved from https://pubs.rsna.org/doi/full/10.1148/radiol.2020200905

Liu, K., Xu, P., Lv, W., Qiu, X., Yao, J., Gu, J., & Wei, W. (2020). CT manifestations of coronavirus disease-2019: A retrospective analysis of 73 cases by disease severity. European Journal Of Radiology, 126, 108941. DOI: 10.1016/j.ejrad.2020.108941