Hybrid Deep Learning Model For Diagnosis Of Covid-19 Using Ct Scans And Clinical/Demographic Data

The unprecedented COVID-19 pandemic has been remarkably impacting the world and influencing a broad aspect of people's lives since its first emergence in late 2019. The highly contagious nature of the COVID-19 has raised the necessity of developing deep learning-based diagnostic tools to identify the infected cases in the early stages. Recently, we proposed a fully-automated framework based on Capsule Networks, referred to as the CT-CAPS, to distinguish COVID-19 infection from normal and Community Acquired Pneumonia (CAP) cases using chest Computed Tomography (CT) scans. Although CT scans can provide a comprehensive illustration of the lung abnormalities, COVID-19 lung manifestations highly overlap with the CAP findings making their identification challenging even for experienced radiologists. Here, the CT-CAPS is augmented with a wide range of clinical/demographic data, including patients' gender, age, weight and symptoms. More specifically, we propose a hybrid deep learning model that utilizes both clinical/demographic data and CT scans to classify COVID-19 and non-COVID cases using a Random Forest Classifier. The proposed hybrid model specifies the most important predictive factors increasing the explainability of the model. The experimental results show that the proposed hybrid model improves the CT-CAPS performance, achieving accuracy of 90.8%, sensitivity of 94.5% and specificity of 86.0%.