METHODS: Overall, 612 patients (306 COVID-19 and 306 non-COVID-19 pneumonia) were recruited. Twenty radiological features were extracted from CT images to evaluate the pattern, location, and distribution of lesions of patients in both groups. All significant CT features were fed in five classifiers namely decision tree, K-nearest neighbor, naïve Bayes, support vector machine, and ensemble to evaluate the best performing CAD system in classifying COVID-19 and non-COVID-19 cases.
RESULTS: Location and distribution pattern of involvement, number of the lesion, ground-glass opacity (GGO) and crazy-paving, consolidation, reticular, bronchial wall thickening, nodule, air bronchogram, cavity, pleural effusion, pleural thickening, and lymphadenopathy are the significant features to classify COVID-19 from non-COVID-19 groups. Our proposed CAD system obtained the sensitivity, specificity, and accuracy of 0.965, 93.54%, 90.32%, and 91.94%, respectively, using ensemble (COVIDiag) classifier.
CONCLUSIONS: This study proposed a COVIDiag model obtained promising results using CT radiological routine features. It can be considered an adjunct tool by the radiologists during the current COVID-19 pandemic to make an accurate diagnosis.
KEY POINTS: • Location and distribution of involvement, number of lesions, GGO and crazy-paving, consolidation, reticular, bronchial wall thickening, nodule, air bronchogram, cavity, pleural effusion, pleural thickening, and lymphadenopathy are the significant features between COVID-19 from non-COVID-19 groups. • The proposed CAD system, COVIDiag, could diagnose COVID-19 pneumonia cases with an AUC of 0.965 (sensitivity = 93.54%; specificity = 90.32%; and accuracy = 91.94%). • The AUC, sensitivity, specificity, and accuracy obtained by radiologist diagnosis are 0.879, 87.10%, 88.71%, and 87.90%, respectively.
METHODS: A total of 1602 thyroid nodules from four centers across two countries (Iran and Malaysia) were included for the development and validation of AI models. From each original and expanded contour, which included the peritumoral region, 2060 handcrafted and 1024 deep radiomics features were extracted to assess the effectiveness of the peritumoral region in the AI diagnosis profile. The performance of four algorithms, namely, support vector machine with linear (SVM_lin) and radial basis function (SVM_RBF) kernels, logistic regression, and K-nearest neighbor, was evaluated. The diagnostic performance of the proposed AI model was compared with two radiologists based on the American Thyroid Association (ATA) and the Thyroid Imaging Reporting & Data System (TI-RADS™) guidelines to show the model's applicability in clinical routines.
RESULTS: Thirty-five hand-crafted and 36 deep radiomics features were considered for model development. In the training step, SVM_RBF and SVM_lin showed the best results when rectangular contours 40% greater than the original contours were used for both hand-crafted and deep features. Ensemble-learning with SVM_RBF and SVM_lin obtained AUC of 0.954, 0.949, 0.932, and 0.921 in internal and external validations of the Iran cohort and Malaysia cohorts 1 and 2, respectively, and outperformed both radiologists.
CONCLUSION: The proposed AI model trained on nodule+the peripheral region performed optimally in external validations and outperformed the radiologists using the ATA and TI-RADS guidelines.
METHOD: In the present study, three separate data cohorts containing 1288 breast lesions from three countries (Malaysia, Iran, and Turkey) were utilized for MLmodel development and external validation. The model was trained on ultrasound images of 725 breast lesions, and validation was done separately on the remaining data. An expert radiologist and a radiology resident classified the lesions based on the BI-RADS lexicon. Thirteen morphometric features were selected from a contour of the lesion and underwent a three-step feature selection process. Five features were chosen to be fed into the model separately and combined with the imaging signs mentioned in the BI-RADS reference guide. A support vector classifier was trained and optimized.
RESULTS: The diagnostic profile of the model with various input data was compared to the expert radiologist and radiology resident. The agreement of each approach with histopathologic specimens was also determined. Based on BI-RADS and morphometric features, the model achieved an area under the receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve (AUC) of 0.885, which is higher than the expert radiologist and radiology resident performances with AUC of 0.814 and 0.632, respectively in all cohorts. DeLong's test also showed that the AUC of the ML protocol was significantly different from that of the expert radiologist (ΔAUCs = 0.071, 95%CI: (0.056, 0.086), P = 0.005).
CONCLUSIONS: These results support the possible role of morphometric features in enhancing the already well-excepted classification schemes.