No Arabic abstract
The worldwide spread of coronavirus disease (COVID-19) has become a threatening risk for global public health. It is of great importance to rapidly and accurately screen patients with COVID-19 from community acquired pneumonia (CAP). In this study, a total of 1658 patients with COVID-19 and 1027 patients of CAP underwent thin-section CT. All images were preprocessed to obtain the segmentations of both infections and lung fields, which were used to extract location-specific features. An infection Size Aware Random Forest method (iSARF) was proposed, in which subjects were automated categorized into groups with different ranges of infected lesion sizes, followed by random forests in each group for classification. Experimental results show that the proposed method yielded sensitivity of 0.907, specificity of 0.833, and accuracy of 0.879 under five-fold cross-validation. Large performance margins against comparison methods were achieved especially for the cases with infection size in the medium range, from 0.01% to 10%. The further inclusion of Radiomics features show slightly improvement. It is anticipated that our proposed framework could assist clinical decision making.
Lung ultrasound imaging has been shown effective in detecting typical patterns for interstitial pneumonia, as a point-of-care tool for both patients with COVID-19 and other community-acquired pneumonia (CAP). In this work, we focus on the hyperechoic B-line segmentation task. Using deep neural networks, we automatically outline the regions that are indicative of pathology-sensitive artifacts and their associated sonographic patterns. With a real-world data-scarce scenario, we investigate approaches to utilize both COVID-19 and CAP lung ultrasound data to train the networks; comparing fine-tuning and unsupervised domain adaptation. Segmenting either type of lung condition at inference may support a range of clinical applications during evolving epidemic stages, but also demonstrates value in resource-constrained clinical scenarios. Adapting real clinical data acquired from COVID-19 patients to those from CAP patients significantly improved Dice scores from 0.60 to 0.87 (p < 0.001) and from 0.43 to 0.71 (p < 0.001), on independent COVID-19 and CAP test cases, respectively. It is of practical value that the improvement was demonstrated with only a small amount of data in both training and adaptation data sets, a common constraint for deploying machine learning models in clinical practice. Interestingly, we also report that the inverse adaptation, from labelled CAP data to unlabeled COVID-19 data, did not demonstrate an improvement when tested on either condition. Furthermore, we offer a possible explanation that correlates the segmentation performance to label consistency and data domain diversity in this point-of-care lung ultrasound application.
We introduce a comprehensive screening platform for the COVID-19 (a.k.a., SARS-CoV-2) pneumonia. The proposed AI-based system works on chest x-ray (CXR) images to predict whether a patient is infected with the COVID-19 disease. Although the recent international joint effort on making the availability of all sorts of open data, the public collection of CXR images is still relatively small for reliably training a deep neural network (DNN) to carry out COVID-19 prediction. To better address such inefficiency, we design a cascaded learning strategy to improve both the sensitivity and the specificity of the resulting DNN classification model. Our approach leverages a large CXR image dataset of non-COVID-19 pneumonia to generalize the original well-trained classification model via a cascaded learning scheme. The resulting screening system is shown to achieve good classification performance on the expanded dataset, including those newly added COVID-19 CXR images.
The coronavirus disease (COVID-19) is rapidly spreading all over the world, and has infected more than 1,436,000 people in more than 200 countries and territories as of April 9, 2020. Detecting COVID-19 at early stage is essential to deliver proper healthcare to the patients and also to protect the uninfected population. To this end, we develop a dual-sampling attention network to automatically diagnose COVID- 19 from the community acquired pneumonia (CAP) in chest computed tomography (CT). In particular, we propose a novel online attention module with a 3D convolutional network (CNN) to focus on the infection regions in lungs when making decisions of diagnoses. Note that there exists imbalanced distribution of the sizes of the infection regions between COVID-19 and CAP, partially due to fast progress of COVID-19 after symptom onset. Therefore, we develop a dual-sampling strategy to mitigate the imbalanced learning. Our method is evaluated (to our best knowledge) upon the largest multi-center CT data for COVID-19 from 8 hospitals. In the training-validation stage, we collect 2186 CT scans from 1588 patients for a 5-fold cross-validation. In the testing stage, we employ another independent large-scale testing dataset including 2796 CT scans from 2057 patients. Results show that our algorithm can identify the COVID-19 images with the area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUC) value of 0.944, accuracy of 87.5%, sensitivity of 86.9%, specificity of 90.1%, and F1-score of 82.0%. With this performance, the proposed algorithm could potentially aid radiologists with COVID-19 diagnosis from CAP, especially in the early stage of the COVID-19 outbreak.
An outbreak of a novel coronavirus disease (i.e., COVID-19) has been recorded in Wuhan, China since late December 2019, which subsequently became pandemic around the world. Although COVID-19 is an acutely treated disease, it can also be fatal with a risk of fatality of 4.03% in China and the highest of 13.04% in Algeria and 12.67% Italy (as of 8th April 2020). The onset of serious illness may result in death as a consequence of substantial alveolar damage and progressive respiratory failure. Although laboratory testing, e.g., using reverse transcription polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR), is the golden standard for clinical diagnosis, the tests may produce false negatives. Moreover, under the pandemic situation, shortage of RT-PCR testing resources may also delay the following clinical decision and treatment. Under such circumstances, chest CT imaging has become a valuable tool for both diagnosis and prognosis of COVID-19 patients. In this study, we propose a weakly supervised deep learning strategy for detecting and classifying COVID-19 infection from CT images. The proposed method can minimise the requirements of manual labelling of CT images but still be able to obtain accurate infection detection and distinguish COVID-19 from non-COVID-19 cases. Based on the promising results obtained qualitatively and quantitatively, we can envisage a wide deployment of our developed technique in large-scale clinical studies.
Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) spread globally in early 2020, causing the world to face an existential health crisis. Automated detection of lung infections from computed tomography (CT) images offers a great potential to augment the traditional healthcare strategy for tackling COVID-19. However, segmenting infected regions from CT slices faces several challenges, including high variation in infection characteristics, and low intensity contrast between infections and normal tissues. Further, collecting a large amount of data is impractical within a short time period, inhibiting the training of a deep model. To address these challenges, a novel COVID-19 Lung Infection Segmentation Deep Network (Inf-Net) is proposed to automatically identify infected regions from chest CT slices. In our Inf-Net, a parallel partial decoder is used to aggregate the high-level features and generate a global map. Then, the implicit reverse attention and explicit edge-attention are utilized to model the boundaries and enhance the representations. Moreover, to alleviate the shortage of labeled data, we present a semi-supervised segmentation framework based on a randomly selected propagation strategy, which only requires a few labeled images and leverages primarily unlabeled data. Our semi-supervised framework can improve the learning ability and achieve a higher performance. Extensive experiments on our COVID-SemiSeg and real CT volumes demonstrate that the proposed Inf-Net outperforms most cutting-edge segmentation models and advances the state-of-the-art performance.