MGH’s new pix2surv AI system can accurately predict COVID outcomes from chest CTs, and it uses an unsupervised design that appears to solve some major COVID AI training and performance challenges.
Background – COVID AI hasn’t exactly earned the best reputation (short history + high annotation labor > leading to bad data > creating generalization issues), limiting most real world COVID analysis to logistic regression.
Designing pix2surv – pix2surv’s weakly unsupervised design and use of a generative adversarial network avoids these COVID AI pitfalls. It was directly trained with CTs from MGH’s COVID workflow (no labeling, no supervised training) and accurately estimates patient outcomes directly from their chest CTs.
pix2surv Performance – pix2surv accurately predicted the time of each patient’s ICU admission or death and applied the same analysis to stratify patients into high and low-risk groups. More notably, it “significantly outperformed” current laboratory tests and image-based methods with both predictions.
Applications – The MGH researchers believe pix2surv can be expanded to other COVID use cases (e.g. predicting Long COVID), as well as “other diseases” that are commonly diagnosed in medical images and might be hindered by annotation labor.
The Takeaway – pix2surv will require a lot more testing, and its chance of maintaining this type of performance across other sites and diseases might be a longshot (at least right away). However, pix2surv’s streamlined training and initial results are notable, and it would be very significant if a network like this was able to bring pattern-based unsupervised AI into clinical use.
