Radiographic findings in COVID-19: Comparison between AI and radiologist

CONTEXT: As the burden of COVID-19 enhances, the need of a fast and reliable screening method is imperative. Chest radiographs plays a pivotal role in rapidly triaging the patients. Unfortunately, in low-resource settings, there is a scarcity of trained radiologists. AIM: This study evaluates and compares the performance of an artificial intelligence (AI) system with a radiologist in detecting chest radiograph findings due to COVID-19. SUBJECTS AND METHODS: The test set consisted of 457 CXR images of patients with suspected COVID-19 pneumonia over a period of three months. The radiographs were evaluated by a radiologist with experience of more than 13 years and by the AI system (NeuraCovid, a web application that pairs with the AI model COVID-NET). Performance of AI system and the radiologist were compared by calculating the sensitivity, specificity and generating a receiver operating characteristic curve. RT-PCR test results were used as the gold standard. RESULTS: The radiologist obtained a sensitivity and specificity of 44.1% and 92.5%, respectively, whereas the AI had a sensitivity and specificity of 41.6% and 60%, respectively. The area under curve for correctly classifying CXR images as COVID-19 pneumonia was 0.48 for the AI system and 0.68 for the radiologist. The radiologist's prediction was found to be superior to that of the AI with a P VALUE of 0.005. CONCLUSION: The specificity and sensitivity of detecting lung involvement in COVID-19, by the radiologist, was found to be superior to that by the AI system.