  Under the epidemic of the novel coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19), chest
X-ray computed tomography imaging is being used for effectively screening
COVID-19 patients. The development of computer-aided systems based on deep
neural networks (DNNs) has been advanced, to rapidly and accurately detect
COVID-19 cases, because the need for expert radiologists, who are limited in
number, forms a bottleneck for the screening. However, so far, the
vulnerability of DNN-based systems has been poorly evaluated, although DNNs are
vulnerable to a single perturbation, called universal adversarial perturbation
(UAP), which can induce DNN failure in most classification tasks. Thus, we
focus on representative DNN models for detecting COVID-19 cases from chest
X-ray images and evaluate their vulnerability to UAPs generated using simple
iterative algorithms. We consider nontargeted UAPs, which cause a task failure
resulting in an input being assigned an incorrect label, and targeted UAPs,
which cause the DNN to classify an input into a specific class. The results
demonstrate that the models are vulnerable to nontargeted and targeted UAPs,
even in case of small UAPs. In particular, 2% norm of the UPAs to the average
norm of an image in the image dataset achieves >85% and >90% success rates for
the nontargeted and targeted attacks, respectively. Due to the nontargeted
UAPs, the DNN models judge most chest X-ray images as COVID-19 cases. The
targeted UAPs make the DNN models classify most chest X-ray images into a given
target class. The results indicate that careful consideration is required in
practical applications of DNNs to COVID-19 diagnosis; in particular, they
emphasize the need for strategies to address security concerns. As an example,
we show that iterative fine-tuning of the DNN models using UAPs improves the
robustness of the DNN models against UAPs.
