Comparison of the Discrimination Performance of AI Scoring and the Brixia Score in Predicting COVID-19 Severity on Chest X-Ray Imaging: Diagnostic Accuracy Study

Background: The artificial intelligence (AI) analysis of chest x-rays can increase the precision of binary COVID-19 diagnosis. However, it is unknown if AI-based chest x-rays can predict who will develop severe COVID-19, especially in low- and middle-income countries.

Objective: The study aims to compare the performance of human radiologist Brixia scores versus 2 AI scoring systems in predicting the severity of COVID-19 pneumonia.

Methods: We performed a cross-sectional study of 300 patients suspected with and with confirmed COVID-19 infection in Jakarta, Indonesia. A total of 2 AI scores were generated using CAD4COVID x-ray software.

Results: The AI probability score had slightly lower discrimination (area under the curve [AUC] 0.787, 95% CI 0.722-0.852). The AI score for the affected lung area (AUC 0.857, 95% CI 0.809-0.905) was almost as good as the human Brixia score (AUC 0.863, 95% CI 0.818-0.908).

Conclusions: The AI score for the affected lung area and the human radiologist Brixia score had similar and good discrimination performance in predicting COVID-19 severity. Our study demonstrated that using AI-based diagnostic tools is possible, even in low-resource settings. However, before it is widely adopted in daily practice, more studies with a larger scale and that are prospective in nature are needed to confirm our findings.