Researchers from the University of Macao of China's Macao Special Administrative Region and institutions in central China's Hubei Province have developed an intelligent system to combat COVID-19. This innovation coronavirus-inflicted pneumonia from other common pneumonia, has said the university.

The new system developed by Prof. Wong Pak Kin in the Faculty of Science and Technology, and his student Yan Tao in the Department of Electromechanical Engineering, can tell COVID-19 from other common pneumonia at a speed nearly 60 times faster than radiologists, the University unveiled.

Researchers in question have cooperated with counterparts at institutions in Hubei Province to collect data on 206 confirmed COVID-19 patients and their 416 chest computed tomography (CT) scans, as well as data on 412 patients with non-COVID-19 pneumonia and their 412 chest CT scans.

Based on these CT images, the researchers developed an automatic diagnosis system based on a multi-scale convolutional neural network. The verification results have shown that with a limited amount of data, the intelligent diagnosis system can successfully distinguish COVID-19-caused pneumonia from other common pneumonia.

CT diagnosis has a very high degree of accuracy and can provide more clinical information for COVID-19 detection and diagnosis. But the large number of scan images and lengthy time for manual identification bring big challenge for radiologists.