Predicting intensive care need for COVID-19 patients using deep learning on chest radiography

Image-based prediction of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) severity and resource needs can be an important means to address the COVID-19 pandemic. In this study, we propose an artificial intelligence/machine learning (AI/ML) COVID-19 prognosis method to predict patients' needs for intensive care by analyzing chest X-ray radiography (CXR) images using deep learning.

The dataset consisted of 8357 CXR exams from 5046 COVID-19-positive patients as confirmed by reverse transcription polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR) tests for the SARS-CoV-2 virus with a training/validation/test split of 64%/16%/20% on a by patient level. Our model involved a DenseNet121 network with a sequential transfer learning technique employed to train on a sequence of gradually more specific and complex tasks: (1) fine-tuning a model pretrained on ImageNet using a previously established CXR dataset with a broad spectrum of pathologies; (2) refining on another established dataset to detect pneumonia; and (3) fine-tuning using our in-house training/validation datasets to predict patients' needs for intensive care within 24, 48, 72, and 96 h following the CXR exams. The classification performances were evaluated on our independent test set (CXR exams of 1048 patients) using the area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUC) as the figure of merit in the task of distinguishing between those COVID-19-positive patients who required intensive care following the imaging exam and those who did not.

Our proposed AI/ML model achieved an AUC (95% confidence interval) of 0.78 (0.74, 0.81) when predicting the need for intensive care 24 h in advance, and at least 0.76 (0.73, 0.80) for 48 h or more in advance using predictions based on the AI prognostic marker derived from CXR images.

This AI/ML prediction model for patients' needs for intensive care has the potential to support both clinical decision-making and resource management.