Outcome Prediction for SARS-CoV-2 Patients Using Machine Learning Modeling of Clinical, Radiological, and Radiomic Features Derived from Chest CT Images

Abstract

(1) Background: Chest Computed Tomography (CT) has been proposed as a non-invasive method for confirming the diagnosis of SARS-CoV-2 patients using radiomic features (RFs) and baseline clinical data. The performance of Machine Learning (ML) methods using RFs derived from semi-automatically segmented lungs in chest CT images was investigated regarding the ability to predict the mortality of SARS-CoV-2 patients. (2) Methods: A total of 179 RFs extracted from 436 chest CT images of SARS-CoV-2 patients, and 8 clinical and 6 radiological variables, were used to train and evaluate three ML methods (Least Absolute Shrinkage and Selection Operator [LASSO] regularized regression, Random Forest Classifier [RFC], and the Fully connected Neural Network [FcNN]) for their ability to predict mortality using the Area Under the Curve (AUC) of Receiver Operator characteristic (ROC) Curves. These three groups of variables were used separately and together as input for constructing and comparing the final performance of ML models. (3) Results: All the ML models using only RFs achieved an informative level regarding predictive ability, outperforming radiological assessment, without however reaching the performance obtained with ML based on clinical variables. The LASSO regularized regression and the FcNN performed equally, both being superior to the RFC. (4) Conclusions: Radiomic features based on semi-automatically segmented CT images and ML approaches can aid in identifying patients with a high risk of mortality, allowing a fast, objective, and generalizable method for improving prognostic assessment by providing a second expert opinion that outperforms human evaluation.