ABSTRACT
Early detection of COVID-19 based on chest CT will enable timely treatment of patients and help control the spread of the disease. With rapid spreading of COVID-19 in many countries, however, CT volumes of suspicious patients are increasing at a speed much faster than the availability of human experts. We proposed an artificial intelligence (AI) system for fast COVID-19 detection and performed extensive statistical analysis of CTs of COVID-19 based on the AI system. We developed and evaluated our system on a large dataset with more than 10 thousand CT volumes from COVID-19, influenza-A/B, non-viral community acquired pneumonia (CAP) and non-pneumonia subjects. In such a difficult multi-class diagnosis task, our deep convolutional neural network-based system is able to achieve an area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUC) of 97.17%, a sensitivity of 90.19%, and a specificity of 95.76% for COVID-19 on internal test cohort of 3,203 scans and AUC of 97.77% on the publicly available CC-CCII database with 1,943 test samples. In a reader study involving five radiologists, the AI system outperforms all of radiologists in more challenging tasks at a speed of two orders of magnitude above them. Diagnosis performance of chest x-ray (CXR) is compared. Detailed interpretation of deep network is also performed to relate AI results with CT findings. The code is available at https://github.com/ChenWWWeixiang/diagnosis_covid19.