Machine Learning-based CT Radiomics Model Distinguishes COVID-19 From Non-COVID-19 Pneumonia (preprint)

ABSTRACT

Background: To develop a machine learning-based CT radiomics model is critical for the accurate diagnosis of the rapid spread Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19).Methods: In this retrospective study, a total of 326 chest CT exams from 134 patients (63 confirmed COVID-19 patients and 71 non-COVID-19 patients) were collected from January 20 to February 8, 2020. A semi-automatic segmentation procedure was used to delineate the region of interest (ROI), and the radiomic features were extracted. The Support Vector Machine(SVM) model was built on the combination of the 4 groups of features, including radiomic features, traditional radiological features, quantifying features and clinical features, by repeated cross-validation procedure and the performance on the time-independent testing cohort was evaluated by the area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUC), accuracy, sensitivity and specificity. Results: For the SVM model that built on the combination of 4 groups of features(integrated model), the per-exam AUC of 0.925(95% CI 0.856 to 0.994) was reached for differentiating COVID-19 on the testing cohort, and the sensitivity and specificity were 0.816(95% CI 0.651 to 0.917) and 0.923(95% CI 0.621 to 0.996), respectively. For the SVM models that built on radiomic features, radiological features, quantifying features and clinical features individually, the AUC on the testing cohort reached 0.765, 0.818, 0.607 and 0.739 respectively, significantly lower than the integrated model, except for the radiomic model.Conclusion: The machine learning-based CT radiomics models may accurately detect COVID-19, helping clinicians and radiologists to identify COVID-19 positive cases.