Background: Artificial intelligence (AI)-aided analysis of chest CT expedites the quantification of abnormalities and may facilitate the diagnosis and assessment of the prognosis of subjects with COVID-19.
Objectives: This study investigates the performance of an AI-aided quantification model in predicting the clinical outcomes of hospitalized subjects with COVID-19 and compares it with radiologists' performance.
Subjects and methods: A total of 90 subjects with COVID-19 (men, n = 59 [65.6%]; age, 52.9±16.7 years) were recruited in this cross-sectional study. Quantification of the total and compromised lung parenchyma was performed by two expert radiologists using a volumetric image analysis software and compared against an AI-assisted package consisting of a modified U-Net model for segmenting COVID-19 lesions and an off-the-shelf U-Net model augmented with COVID-19 data for segmenting lung volume. The fraction of compromised lung parenchyma (%CL) was calculated. Based on clinical results, the subjects were divided into two categories: critical (n = 45) and noncritical (n = 45). All admission data were compared between the two groups.
Results: There was an excellent agreement between the radiologist-obtained and AI-assisted measurements (intraclass correlation coefficient = 0.88, P < 0.001). Both the AI-assisted and radiologist-obtained %CLs were significantly higher in the critical subjects (P = 0.009 and 0.02, respectively) than in the noncritical subjects. In the multivariate logistic regression analysis to distinguish the critical subjects, an AI-assisted %CL ≥35% (odds ratio [OR] = 17.0), oxygen saturation level of <88% (OR = 33.6), immunocompromised condition (OR = 8.1), and other comorbidities (OR = 15.2) independently remained as significant variables in the models. Our proposed model obtained an accuracy of 83.9%, a sensitivity of 79.1%, and a specificity of 88.6% in predicting critical outcomes.
Conclusions: AI-assisted measurements are similar to quantitative radiologist-obtained measurements in determining lung involvement in COVID-19 subjects.
Copyright: © 2023 Arian et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.