COVID-19 prognosis estimation from CAT scan radiomics: comparison of different machine learning approaches for predicting patients survival and ICU Admission

Since the start of 2020 Sars-COVID19 has given rise to a world-wide pandemic. In an attempt to slow down the spreading of this disease various prevention and diagnostic methods have been developed. In this thesis the attention has been put on Machine Learning to predict prognosis based on data originating from radiological images. Radiomics has been used to extract information from images segmented using a software from the hospital which provided both the clinical data and images. The usefulness of different families of variables has then been evaluated through their performance in the methods used, i.e. Lasso regularized regression and Random Forest. The first chapter is introductory in nature, the second will contain a theoretical overview of the necessary concepts that will be needed throughout this whole work. The focus will be then shifted on methods and instruments used in the development of this thesis. The third chapter will report the results and finally some conclusions will be derived from the previously presented results. It will be concluded that the segmentation and feature extraction step is of pivotal importance in driving the performance of the predictions. In fact, in this thesis, it seems that the information from the images achieves the same predictive power that can be derived from the clinical data. This can be interpreted in three ways: first it can be taken as a symptom of the fact that even the more complex Sars-COVID19 cases can be segmented automatically, or semi-automatically by untrained personnel, leading to results competing with other methodologies. Secondly it can be taken to show that the performance of clinical variables can be reached by radiomic features alone in a semi-automatic pipeline, which could aid in reducing the workload imposed on medical professionals in case of pandemic. Finally it can be taken as proof that the method implemented has room to improve by more carefully investing in the segmentation phase