The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) outbreak has reached pandemic status. Drastic measures of social distancing are enforced in society and healthcare systems are being pushed to and beyond their limits. To help in the fight against this threat on human health, a fully automated AI framework was developed to extract radiomics features from volumetric chest computed tomography (CT) exams. The detection model was developed on a dataset of 1381 patients (181 COVID-19 patients plus 1200 non COVID control patients). A second, independent dataset of 197 RT-PCR confirmed COVID-19 patients and 500 control patients was used to assess the performance of the model. Diagnostic performance was assessed by the area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUC). The model had an AUC of 0.882 (95% CI: 0.851–0.913) in the independent test dataset (641 patients). The optimal decision threshold, considering the cost of false negatives twice as high as the cost of false positives, resulted in an accuracy of 85.18%, a sensitivity of 69.52%, a specificity of 91.63%, a negative predictive value (NPV) of 94.46% and a positive predictive value (PPV) of 59.44%. Benchmarked against RT-PCR confirmed cases of COVID-19, our AI framework can accurately differentiate COVID-19 from routine clinical conditions in a fully automated fashion. Thus, providing rapid accurate diagnosis in patients suspected of COVID-19 infection, facilitating the timely implementation of isolation procedures and early intervention.

Introduction: Teledermoscopy using smartphone-based applications is becoming more and more important in a setting of increasing frequency of skin cancer and difficult access to specialized care. The TELESPOT project aimed to provide rapid diagnosis and speed up patient flow between primary healthcare centers and a tertiary care center in Belgium. The aim of the present study is to describe the development of an in-house smartphone-based dermoscopy application, evaluate its real-life value in a series of primary healthcare centers, and present preliminary diagnostic data. Methods: Modified Likert scales were used to assess patient and general practitioner (GP) satisfaction rates for the system. Furthermore, a total of 105 photographic and dermoscopic images were acquired in a series of 80 patients at participating centers. Results: Overall, patient and GP satisfaction levels were 89% and 94%, respectively. Highpriority management was recommended in 7.6% of cases (8/105: 3 basal cell carcinoma, 1 primary cutaneous B-cell lymphoma, 1 Spitz melanocytic nevus, 1 congenital nevus, 1 in situ melanoma, and 1 invasive melanoma, proven by histology). Conclusions: The primary healthcare centers were highly satisfied with the TELESPOT project in terms of user-friendliness, efficacy, and reliability as well as in providing a reinforced image of first-line medicine efforts in combating skin cancer.

Background The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) outbreak has reached pandemic status. Drastic measures of social distancing are enforced in society and healthcare systems are being pushed to and over their limits.Objectives To develop a fully automatic framework to detect COVID-19 by applying AI to chest CT and evaluate validation performance. MethodsIn this retrospective multi-site study, a fully automated AI framework was developed to extract radiomics features from volumetric chest CT exams to learn the detection pattern of COVID-19 patients. We analysed the data from 181 RT-PCR confirmed COVID-19 patients as well as 1200 other non-COVID-19 control patients to build and assess the performance of the model. The datasets were collected from 2 different hospital sites of the CHU Liège, Belgium. Diagnostic performance was assessed by the area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUC), sensitivity and specificity.Results 1381 patients were included in this study. The average age was 64.4±15.8 and 63.8±14.4 years with a gender balance of 56% and 52% male in the COVID-19 and control group, respectively. The final curated dataset used for model construction and validation consisted of chest CT scans of 892 patients. The model sensitivity and specificity for detecting COVID-19 in the test set (training 80% and test 20% of patients) were 78.94% and 91.09%, respectively, with an AUC of 0.9398 (95% CI: 0.875-1). The negative predictive value of the algorithm was found to be larger than 97%.All rights reserved. No reuse allowed without permission.was not certified by peer review) is the author/funder, who has granted medRxiv a license to display the preprint in perpetuity.

PurposeIn this study, we propose an Artificial Intelligence framework based on 3D Convolutional Neural network (CNN) to classify CT scans of patients with COVID-19, Influenza/CAP, and no-infection, after automatic segmentation of the lungs and lung abnormalities.MethodsThe AI classification model is based on inflated 3D Inception architecture and was trained and validated on retrospective data of CT images of 667 adult patients (No infection: 188, COVID-19: 230, Influenza/CAP: 249) and 210 adult patients (No infection: 70, COVID-19: 70, Influenza/CAP: 70), respectively. The model's performance was independently evaluated on an internal test set of 273 adult patients (No infection: 55, COVID-19: 94, Influenza/CAP: 124) and an external validation set coming from a different center (305 adult patients, COVID-19: 169, No infection: 76, Influenza/CAP: 60).ResultsThe model showed excellent performance in the external validation set with an AUC of 0.90, 0.92 and 0.92 for COVID-19, Influenza/CAP and No infection respectively. The selection of the input slices based on automatic segmentation of the abnormalities in the lung reduces analysis time (56 s per scan) and computational burden of the model. The TRIPOD score of the proposed model is 47% (15 out of 32 TRIPOD items).ConclusionThis AI solution provides rapid and accurate diagnosis in patients suspected of COVID-19 infection and influenza.

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