CT-based radiomics combined with signs: a valuable tool to help radiologist discriminate COVID-19 and influenza pneumonia

BACKGROUND: In this COVID-19 pandemic, the differential diagnosis of viral pneumonia is still challenging. We aimed to assess the classification performance of computed tomography (CT)-based CT signs and radiomics features for discriminating COVID-19 and influenza pneumonia. METHODS: A total of 154 patients with confirmed viral pneumonia (COVID-19: 89 cases, influenza pneumonia: 65 cases) were collected retrospectively in this study. Pneumonia signs and radiomics features were extracted from the initial unenhanced chest CT images to build independent and combined models. The predictive performance of the radiomics model, CT sign model, the combined model was constructed based on the whole dataset and internally invalidated by using 1000-times bootstrap. Diagnostic performance of the models was assessed via receiver operating characteristic (ROC) analysis. RESULTS: The combined models consisted of 4 significant CT signs and 7 selected features and demonstrated better discrimination performance between COVID-19 and influenza pneumonia than the single radiomics model. For the radiomics model, the area under the ROC curve (AUC) was 0.888 (sensitivity, 86.5%; specificity, 78.4%; accuracy, 83.1%), and the AUC was 0.906 (sensitivity, 86.5%; specificity, 81.5%; accuracy, 84.4%) in the CT signs model. After combining CT signs and radiomics features, AUC of the combined model was 0.959 (sensitivity, 89.9%; specificity, 90.7%; accuracy, 90.3%). CONCLUSIONS: CT-based radiomics combined with signs might be a potential method for distinguishing COVID-19 and influenza pneumonia with satisfactory performance. SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1186/s12880-021-00564-w.