Deep learning for COVID-19 chest CT (computed tomography) image analysis: a lesson from lung cancer

DOI: https://doi.org/10.21203/rs.3.rs-58467/v1

Abstract

As a recent global health emergency, the quick and reliable diagnosis of COVID-19 is urgently needed. Thus, many artificial intelligence (AI)-base methods are proposed for COVID-19 chest CT (computed tomography) image analysis. However, there are very limited COVID-19 chest CT images publicly available to evaluate those deep neural networks. On the other hand, a huge amount of CT images from lung cancer are publicly available. To build a reliable deep learning model trained and tested with a larger scale dataset, we build a public COVID-19 CT dataset, containing 1186 CT images synthesized from lung cancer CT images using CycleGAN. Additionally, various deep learning models are tested with synthesized or real CT images for COVID-19 and non-COVID-19 classification. In comparison, all models achieve excellent results (over than 90%) in accuracy, precision, recall and F1 score for both synthesized and real COVID-19 CT images, demonstrating the reliable of the synthesized dataset. The public dataset and deep learning models can facilitate the development of accurate and efficient diagnostic testing for COVID-19.


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