The Universal Cloud-HPC Pipeline for the AI-Assisted Explainable Diagnosis of COVID-19 Pneumonia

We'll present a methodology to run DNN pipelines on hybrid cloud+HPC infrastructure. We'll also define a "universal pipeline" for medical images. The pipeline can reproduce all state-of-the-art DNNs to diagnose COVID-19 pneumonia, which appeared in the literature during the first Italian lockdown and following months. We can run all of them (across cloud+HPC platforms) and compare their performance in terms of sensitivity and specificity to set a baseline to evaluate future progress in the automated diagnosis of COVID-19. Also, the pipeline makes existing DNNs explainable by way of adversarial training. The pipeline is easily portable and can run across different infrastructures, adapting the performance-urgency trade-off. The methodology builds onto two novel software programs: the streamflow workflow system and the AI-sandbox concept (parallel container with user-space encrypted file system). We reach over 92% accuracy in diagnosing COVID pneumonia.