Deep Learning Models for Predicting Severe Progression in COVID-19-Infected Patients: Retrospective Study

BACKGROUND: Many COVID-19 patients rapidly progress to respiratory failure with a broad range of severities. Identification of high-risk cases is critical for early intervention. OBJECTIVE: The aim of this study is to develop deep learning models that can rapidly identify high-risk COVID-19 patients based on computed tomography (CT) images and clinical data. METHODS: We analyzed 297 COVID-19 patients from five hospitals in Daegu, South Korea. A mixed artificial convolutional neural network (ACNN) model, combining an artificial neural network for clinical data and a convolutional neural network for 3D CT imaging data, was developed to classify these cases as either high risk of severe progression (ie, event) or low risk (ie, event-free). RESULTS: Using the mixed ACNN model, we were able to obtain high classification performance using novel coronavirus pneumonia lesion images (ie, 93.9% accuracy, 80.8% sensitivity, 96.9% specificity, and 0.916 area under the curve [AUC] score) and lung segmentation images (ie, 94.3% accuracy, 74.7% sensitivity, 95.9% specificity, and 0.928 AUC score) for event versus event-free groups. CONCLUSIONS: Our study successfully differentiated high-risk cases among COVID-19 patients using imaging and clinical features. The developed model can be used as a predictive tool for interventions in aggressive therapies.