Deep convolution neural networks to differentiate between COVID-19 and other pulmonary abnormalities on chest radiographs: Evaluation using internal and external datasets

We aimed to evaluate the performance of convolutional neural networks (CNNs) in the classification of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) disease using normal, pneumonia, and COVID-19 chest radiographs (CXRs). First, we collected 9194 CXRs from open datasets and 58 from the Korea University Anam Hospital (KUAH). The number of normal, pneumonia, and COVID-19 CXRs were 4580, 3884, and 730, respectively. The CXRs obtained from the open dataset were randomly assigned to the training, tuning, and test sets in a 70:10:20 ratio. For external validation, the KUAH (20 normal, 20 pneumonia, and 18 COVID-19) dataset, verified by radiologists using computed tomography, was used. Subsequently, transfer learning was conducted using DenseNet169, InceptionResNetV2, and Xception to identify COVID-19 using open datasets (internal) and the KUAH dataset (external) with histogram matching. Gradient-weighted class activation mapping was used for the visualization of abnormal patterns in CXRs. The average AUC and accuracy of the multiscale and mixed-COVID-19Net using three CNNs over five folds were (0.99 ± 0.01 and 92.94% ± 0.45%), (0.99 ± 0.01 and 93.12% ± 0.23%), and (0.99 ± 0.01 and 93.57% ± 0.29%), respectively, using the open datasets (internal). Furthermore, these values were (0.75 and 74.14%), (0.72 and 68.97%), and (0.77 and 68.97%), respectively, for the best model among the fivefold cross-validation with the KUAH dataset (external) using domain adaptation. The various state-of-the-art models trained on open datasets show satisfactory performance for clinical interpretation. Furthermore, the domain adaptation for external datasets was found to be important for detecting COVID-19 as well as other diseases.