To determine the reliability of an artificial intelligence, deep learning (AI/DL)-based method of chest computer tomography (CT) scan analysis to distinguish pulmonary sarcoidosis from negative lung cancer screening chest CT scans (Lung Imaging Reporting and Data System score 1, Lung-RADS score 1).

Chest CT scans of pulmonary sarcoidosis were evaluated by a clinician experienced with sarcoidosis and a chest radiologist for clinical and radiologic evidence of sarcoidosis and exclusion of alternative or concomitant pulmonary diseases. The AI/DL based method used an ensemble network architecture combining Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) and Vision Transformers (ViTs). The method was applied to 126 pulmonary sarcoidosis and 96 Lung-RADS score 1 CT scans. The analytic approach of training and validation of the AI/DL method used a fivefold cross-validation technique, where 4/5th of the available data set was used to train a diagnostic model and tested on the remaining 1/5th of the data set, and repeated 4 more times with non-overlapping validation/test data. The probability values were used to generate Receiver Operating Characteristic (ROC) curves to assess the model's discriminatory power.

The sensitivity, specificity, positive and negative predictive value of the AI/DL method for the 5 folds of the training/validation sets and the entire set of CT scans were all over 94% to distinguish pulmonary sarcoidosis from LUNG-RADS score 1 chest CT scans. The area under the curve for the corresponding ROC curves were all over 97%.

This AL/DL model shows promise to distinguish sarcoidosis from alternative pulmonary conditions using minimal radiologic data.

A large number of reports present artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms, which support pneumonia detection caused by COVID-19 from chest CT (computed tomography) scans. Only a few studies provided access to the source code, which limits the analysis of the out-of-distribution generalization ability. This study presents Cimatec-CovNet-19, a new light 3D convolutional neural network inspired by the VGG16 architecture that supports COVID-19 identification from chest CT scans. We trained the algorithm with a dataset of 3000 CT Scans (1500 COVID-19-positive) with images from different parts of the world, enhanced with 3000 images obtained with data augmentation techniques. We introduced a novel pre-processing approach to perform a slice-wise selection based solely on the lung CT masks and an empirically chosen threshold for the very first slice. It required only 16 slices from a CT examination to identify COVID-19. The model achieved a recall of 0.88, specificity of 0.88, ROC-AUC of 0.95, PR-AUC of 0.95, and F1-score of 0.88 on a test set with 414 samples (207 COVID-19). These results support Cimatec-CovNet-19 as a good and light screening tool for COVID-19 patients. The whole code is freely available for the scientific community.