Prediction of early-phase cytomegalovirus pneumonia in post-stem cell transplantation using a deep learning model.

Background: Diagnostic challenges exist for CMV pneumonia in post-hematopoietic stem cell transplantation (post-HSCT) patients, despite early-phase radiographic changes.

Objective: The study aims to employ a deep learning model distinguishing CMV pneumonia from COVID-19 pneumonia, community-acquired pneumonia, and normal lungs post-HSCT.

Methods: Initially, 6 neural network models were pre-trained with COVID-19 pneumonia, community-acquired pneumonia, and normal lung CT images from Kaggle's COVID multiclass dataset (Dataset A), then Dataset A was combined with the CMV pneumonia images from our center, forming Dataset B. We use a few-shot transfer learning strategy to fine-tune the pre-trained models and evaluate model performance in Dataset B.

Results: 34 cases of CMV pneumonia were found between January 2018 and December 2022 post-HSCT. Dataset A contained 1681 images of each subgroup from Kaggle. Combined with Dataset A, Dataset B was initially formed by 98 images of CMV pneumonia and normal lung. The optimal model (Xception) achieved an accuracy of 0.9034. Precision, recall, and F1-score all reached 0.9091, with an AUC of 0.9668 in the test set of Dataset B.

Conclusions: This framework demonstrates the deep learning model's ability to distinguish rare pneumonia types utilizing a small volume of CT images, facilitating early detection of CMV pneumonia post-HSCT.