This is a PDF file of a peer-reviewed paper that has been accepted for publication. Although unedited, the content has been subjected to preliminary formatting. Nature is providing this early version of the typeset paper as a service to our authors and readers. The text and figures will undergo copyediting and a proof review before the paper is published in its final form. Please note that during the production process errors may be discovered which could affect the content, and all legal disclaimers apply.
Accurate and rapid diagnosis of COVID-19 suspected cases plays a crucial role in timely quarantine and medical treatment. Developing a deep learning-based model for automatic COVID-19 diagnosis on chest CT is helpful to counter the outbreak of SARS-CoV-2. A weaklysupervised deep learning framework was developed using 3D CT volumes for COVID-19 classification and lesion localization. For each patient, the lung region was segmented using a pre-trained UNet; then the segmented 3D lung region was fed into a 3D deep neural network to predict the probability of COVID-19 infectious; the COVID-19 lesions are localized by combining the activation regions in the classification network and the unsupervised connected components. 499 CT volumes were used for training and 131 CT volumes were used for testing. Our algorithm obtained 0.959 ROC AUC and 0.976 PR AUC. When using a probability threshold of 0.5 to classify COVID-positive and COVID-negative, the algorithm obtained an accuracy of 0.901, a positive predictive value of 0.840 and a very high negative predictive value of 0.982. The algorithm took only 1.93 seconds to process a single patient's CT volume using a dedicated GPU. Our weakly-supervised deep learning
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.