Computer-aided diagnosis of chest X-ray for COVID-19 diagnosis in external validation study by radiologists with and without deep learning system

To evaluate the diagnostic performance of our deep learning (DL) model of COVID-19 and investigate whether the diagnostic performance of radiologists was improved by referring to our model. Our datasets contained chest X-rays (CXRs) for the following three categories: normal (NORMAL), non-COVID-19 pneumonia (PNEUMONIA), and COVID-19 pneumonia (COVID). We used two public datasets and private dataset collected from eight hospitals for the development and external validation of our DL model (26,393 CXRs). Eight radiologists performed two reading sessions: one session was performed with reference to CXRs only, and the other was performed with reference to both CXRs and the results of the DL model. The evaluation metrics for the reading session were accuracy, sensitivity, specificity, and area under the curve (AUC). The accuracy of our DL model was 0.733, and that of the eight radiologists without DL was 0.696 ± 0.031. There was a significant difference in AUC between the radiologists with and without DL for COVID versus NORMAL or PNEUMONIA (p = 0.0038). Our DL model alone showed better diagnostic performance than that of most radiologists. In addition, our model significantly improved the diagnostic performance of radiologists for COVID versus NORMAL or PNEUMONIA.