Analysis of Imbalanced Datasets in the Performance of Deep Learning Approaches for COVID-19 Screening from Chest X-ray Imaging: Impact of Sex and Age Factors

Abstract

[Absctract]: In this work, we analysed 11 imbalance scenarios with female and male COVID-19 patients present in different proportions for the sex analysis, and 6 scenarios where only one specific age range was used for training for the age factor. In each study, 3 different approaches for automatic COVID-19 screening were used: (I) Normal vs COVID-19, (II) Pneumonia vs COVID-19 and (III) Non-COVID-19 vs COVID-19. The present study was validated using two representative public chest X-ray datasets, allowing a reliable analysis to support the clinical decision-making process. The results for the sex-related analysis indicate this factor slightly affects the COVID- 19 deep learning-based systems, although the identified differences are not relevant enough to considerably worsen the system. Regarding the age-related analysis, this factor was observed to be influencing the system in a more consistent way than the sex factor, as it was present in all considered scenarios.