Deep Learning Models May Spuriously Classify Covid-19 from X-ray Images Based on Confounders
arXiv:2102.04300
Abstract
Identifying who is infected with the Covid-19 virus is critical for controlling its spread. X-ray machines are widely available worldwide and can quickly provide images that can be used for diagnosis. A number of recent studies claim it may be possible to build highly accurate models, using deep learning, to detect Covid-19 from chest X-ray images. This paper explores the robustness and generalization ability of convolutional neural network models in diagnosing Covid-19 disease from frontal-view (AP/PA), raw chest X-ray images that were lung field cropped. Some concerning observations are made about high performing models that have learned to rely on confounding features related to the data source, rather than the patient's lung pathology, when differentiating between Covid-19 positive and negative labels. Specifically, these models likely made diagnoses based on confounding factors such as patient age or image processing artifacts, rather than medically relevant information.
References in corpus (11)
- Covid-19: Automatic detection from X-Ray images utilizing Transfer Learning with Convolutional Neural Networks
- Can AI help in screening Viral and COVID-19 pneumonia?
- COVIDX-Net: A Framework of Deep Learning Classifiers to Diagnose COVID-19 in X-Ray Images
- COVID-19 Image Data Collection
- PadChest: A large chest x-ray image dataset with multi-label annotated reports
- COVID-ResNet: A Deep Learning Framework for Screening of COVID19 from Radiographs
- Extracting possibly representative COVID-19 Biomarkers from X-Ray images with Deep Learning approach and image data related to Pulmonary Diseases
- Automatic Detection of Coronavirus Disease (COVID-19) in X-ray and CT Images: A Machine Learning-Based Approach
- Robust Screening of COVID-19 from Chest X-ray via Discriminative Cost-Sensitive Learning
- A Cascaded Learning Strategy for Robust COVID-19 Pneumonia Chest X-Ray Screening
- A cascade network for Detecting COVID-19 using chest x-rays