Papers › A Critic Evaluation of Methods for COVID-19 Automatic Detection from X-Ray Images

A Critic Evaluation of Methods for COVID-19 Automatic Detection from X-Ray Images

27 Apr 2020arXiv:2004.12823archive 2025-07-28

Gianluca Maguolo, Loris Nanni

In this paper, we compare and evaluate different testing protocols used for automatic COVID-19 diagnosis from X-Ray images in the recent literature. We show that similar results can be obtained using X-Ray images that do not contain most of the lungs. We are able to remove the lungs from the images by turning to black the center of the X-Ray scan and training our classifiers only on the outer part of the images. Hence, we deduce that several testing protocols for the recognition are not fair and that the neural networks are learning patterns in the dataset that are not correlated to the presence of COVID-19. Finally, we show that creating a fair testing protocol is a challenging task, and we provide a method to measure how fair a specific testing protocol is. In the future research we suggest to check the fairness of a testing protocol using our tools and we encourage researchers to look for better techniques than the ones that we propose.

PaperPDFCode

In Syntology Open this paper in Syntology's Atlas, the map of the papers in Syntology's graph and their citations.

Code

Ben-USC/COVID-19 mentioned on GitHubpytorch report
dragonsan17/covid_detection_from_xray mentioned on GitHubApache-2.0 report
florenciopaucar/Covid-DataBoss mentioned on GitHubGPL-3.0 report
imanpalsingh/COVID-19-Detection--from-X-rays mentioned on GitHubtfApache-2.0 report

Repository list and official/mentioned flags are the archive's, frozen 2025-07-28. Reachability, where shown, is from one Syntology probe window (2026-09-16 to 2026-09-18); repositories not probed show nothing. GitHub stars are not tracked.

Code Syntology ran Syntology

Not run by Syntology. Nothing on this page verifies that the listed code works.

Tasks

COVID-19 DiagnosisFairness

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

No leaderboard rows for this paper in the archive.

Report a problem or propose a change · a person checks every report against the paper or source before anything changes; decisions are listed on /corrections