Building a CT Scan Covid-19 Classifier Using PyTorch

A family member does this for a living and they have been working on a lot of Covid cases lately, also in emergency situations. Even if you rush it, you have the patient on the bench for at least 10 minutes. Out of the 10 minutes, it only takes takes 1 minute to review the result. In the case of Covid it is something that is very, very easy to analyze visually - even with little experience.

We can still improve the process a lot, there is a huuuge difference depending on equipment. Image quality, image development, the time it takes to get the image developed (yes, sometimes that is done in a different room) vary a lot depending on platform. The software could be improved a lot but vendors don't seem to be developing old platforms a lot - which is sad because equipment doesn't get replaced every couple of years.

Here we don't do CT for Covid (would be even slower), just plain old X-ray.

The specificity of CT when interpreted by humans is reported to be Is it that the non-Covid-19 scans in the training data were easier to recognize than the ones doctors see every day or is the model so much better than humans at recognizing non-Covid-19 cases? If it was the latter, the reduced sensitivity (human: 96% [1], model: 85%) would not look bad at all, right?

[1] https://pubs.rsna.org/doi/full/10.1148/radiol.2020201709