Radiologists versus Deep Convolutional Neural Networks: A Comparative Study for Diagnosing COVID-19

The reverse transcriptase polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR) is still the routinely used test for the diagnosis of SARS-CoV-2 (COVID-19). However, according to several reports, RT-PCR showed a low sensitivity and multiple tests may be required to rule out false negative results. Recently, chest computed tomography (CT) has been an efficient tool to diagnose COVID-19 as it is directly affecting the lungs. In this paper, we investigate the application of pre-trained models in diagnosing patients who are positive for COVID-19 and differentiating it from normal patients, who tested negative for coronavirus. The study aims to compare the generalization capabilities of deep learning models with two thoracic radiologists in diagnosing COVID-19 chest CT images. A dataset of 3000 images was obtained from the Near East Hospital, Cyprus, and used to train and to test the three employed pre-trained models. In a test set of 250 images used to evaluate the deep neural networks and the radiologists, it was found that deep networks (ResNet-18, ResNet-50, and DenseNet-201) can outperform the radiologists in terms of higher accuracy (97.8%), sensitivity (98.1%), specificity (97.3%), precision (98.4%), and F1-score (198.25%), in classifying COVID-19 images.