Artificial Intelligence Empowers Radiologists to Differentiate Pneumonia Induced by COVID-19 versus Influenza Viruses

BACKGROUND: Given the current pandemic, differentiation between pneumonia induced by COVID-19 or influenza viruses is of utmost clinical significance in the patients’ management.

For this purpose, this study was conducted to develop sensitive artificial intelligence (AI) models to assist radiologists to decisively differentiate pneumonia due to COVID-19 versus influenza viruses.

METHODS: Cross sectional chest CT images (N=12744) from well-evaluated cases of pneumonias induced by COVID-19 or H1N1 Influenza viruses, and normal individuals were collected.

We examined the computer tomographic (CT) chest images from 137 individuals.

Various pre-trained convolutional neural network models, such as ResNet-50, InceptionV3, Wide ResNet, SqueezNet, VGG 16 and VGG 19 were fine-tuned on our datasets.

The datasets were used for training (60%), validation (20%), and testing (20%) of the final models.

Also, the predictive power and means of precision and recall were determined for each model.

RESULTS: Fine-tuned ResNet-50 model differentiated the pneumonia due to COVID-19 or H1N1 influenza virus with accuracies of 96.7% and 92%, respectively This model outperformed all others, i.e., InceptionV3, Wide ResNet, SqueezNet, VGG 16 and VGG 19.

CONCLUSION: Fine-tuned and pre-trained image classifying models of AI enable radiologists to reliably differentiate the pneumonia induced by COVID-19 versus H1N1 influenza virus.

For this purpose, ResNet-50 followed by InceptionV3 models proved more promising than other AI models.

Also in the supplements, we share the source codes and our fine-tuned models for use by researchers and clinicians globally toward the critical task of image differentiation of patients infected with COVID-19 versus H1N1 Influenza viruses.