- Published
- 01 March 2021
- Journal article
Common pitfalls and recommendations for using machine learning to detect and prognosticate for COVID-19 using chest radiographs and CT scans
- Authors
-
- Source
- Nature Machine Intelligence
Abstract
Machine learning methods offer great promise for fast and accurate detection and prognostication of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) from standard-of-care chest radiographs (CXR) and chest computed tomography (CT) images. Many articles have been published in 2020 describing new machine learning-based models for both of these tasks, but it is unclear which are of potential clinical utility. In this systematic review, we consider all published papers and preprints, for the period from 1 January 2020 to 3 October 2020, which describe new machine learning models for the diagnosis or prognosis of COVID-19 from CXR or CT images. All manuscripts uploaded to bioRxiv, medRxiv and arXiv along with all entries in EMBASE and MEDLINE in this timeframe are considered. Our search identified 2,212 studies, of which 415 were included after initial screening and, after quality screening, 62 studies were included in this systematic review. Our review finds that none of the models identified are of potential clinical use due to methodological flaws and/or underlying biases. This is a major weakness, given the urgency with which validated COVID-19 models are needed. To address this, we give many recommendations which, if followed, will solve these issues and lead to higher-quality model development and well-documented manuscripts.
Rights
This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.
Cite as
Roberts, M., Driggs, D., Thorpe, M., Gilbey, J., Yeung, M., Ursprung, S., Aviles-Rivero, A., Etmann, C., McCague, C., Beer, L., Weir-McCall, J., Teng, Z., Gkrania-Klotsas, E., Rudd, J., Sala, E. & Schönlieb, C. 2021, 'Common pitfalls and recommendations for using machine learning to detect and prognosticate for COVID-19 using chest radiographs and CT scans', Nature Machine Intelligence, 3(3), pp. 199-217. https://doi.org/10.1038/s42256-021-00307-0