No Arabic abstract
Purpose: The need to streamline patient management for COVID-19 has become more pressing than ever. Chest X-rays provide a non-invasive (potentially bedside) tool to monitor the progression of the disease. In this study, we present a severity score prediction model for COVID-19 pneumonia for frontal chest X-ray images. Such a tool can gauge severity of COVID-19 lung infections (and pneumonia in general) that can be used for escalation or de-escalation of care as well as monitoring treatment efficacy, especially in the ICU. Methods: Images from a public COVID-19 database were scored retrospectively by three blinded experts in terms of the extent of lung involvement as well as the degree of opacity. A neural network model that was pre-trained on large (non-COVID-19) chest X-ray datasets is used to construct features for COVID-19 images which are predictive for our task. Results: This study finds that training a regression model on a subset of the outputs from an this pre-trained chest X-ray model predicts our geographic extent score (range 0-8) with 1.14 mean absolute error (MAE) and our lung opacity score (range 0-6) with 0.78 MAE. Conclusions: These results indicate that our models ability to gauge severity of COVID-19 lung infections could be used for escalation or de-escalation of care as well as monitoring treatment efficacy, especially in the intensive care unit (ICU). A proper clinical trial is needed to evaluate efficacy. To enable this we make our code, labels, and data available online at https://github.com/mlmed/torchxrayvision/tree/master/scripts/covid-severity and https://github.com/ieee8023/covid-chestxray-dataset
To develop a deep-learning model that integrates radiomics analysis for enhanced performance of COVID-19 and Non-COVID-19 pneumonia detection using chest X-ray image, two deep-learning models were trained based on a pre-trained VGG-16 architecture: in the 1st model, X-ray image was the sole input; in the 2nd model, X-ray image and 2 radiomic feature maps (RFM) selected by the saliency map analysis of the 1st model were stacked as the input. Both models were developed using 812 chest X-ray images with 262/288/262 COVID-19/Non-COVID-19 pneumonia/healthy cases, and 649/163 cases were assigned as training-validation/independent test sets. In 1st model using X-ray as the sole input, the 1) sensitivity, 2) specificity, 3) accuracy, and 4) ROC Area-Under-the-Curve of COVID-19 vs Non-COVID-19 pneumonia detection were 1) 0.90$pm$0.07 vs 0.78$pm$0.09, 2) 0.94$pm$0.04 vs 0.94$pm$0.04, 3) 0.93$pm$0.03 vs 0.89$pm$0.03, and 4) 0.96$pm$0.02 vs 0.92$pm$0.04. In the 2nd model, two RFMs, Entropy and Short-Run-Emphasize, were selected with their highest cross-correlations with the saliency maps of the 1st model. The corresponding results demonstrated significant improvements (p<0.05) of COVID-19 vs Non-COVID-19 pneumonia detection: 1) 0.95$pm$0.04 vs 0.85$pm$0.04, 2) 0.97$pm$0.02 vs 0.96$pm$0.02, 3) 0.97$pm$0.02 vs 0.93$pm$0.02, and 4) 0.99$pm$0.01 vs 0.97$pm$0.02. The reduced variations suggested a superior robustness of 2nd model design.
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.
Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) is an infectious disease with first symptoms similar to the flu. COVID-19 appeared first in China and very quickly spreads to the rest of the world, causing then the 2019-20 coronavirus pandemic. In many cases, this disease causes pneumonia. Since pulmonary infections can be observed through radiography images, this paper investigates deep learning methods for automatically analyzing query chest X-ray images with the hope to bring precision tools to health professionals towards screening the COVID-19 and diagnosing confirmed patients. In this context, training datasets, deep learning architectures and analysis strategies have been experimented from publicly open sets of chest X-ray images. Tailored deep learning models are proposed to detect pneumonia infection cases, notably viral cases. It is assumed that viral pneumonia cases detected during an epidemic COVID-19 context have a high probability to presume COVID-19 infections. Moreover, easy-to-apply health indicators are proposed for estimating infection status and predicting patient status from the detected pneumonia cases. Experimental results show possibilities of training deep learning models over publicly open sets of chest X-ray images towards screening viral pneumonia. Chest X-ray test images of COVID-19 infected patients are successfully diagnosed through detection models retained for their performances. The efficiency of proposed health indicators is highlighted through simulated scenarios of patients presenting infections and health problems by combining real and synthetic health data.
Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) has been the main agenda of the whole world, since it came into sight in December 2019 as it has significantly affected the world economy and healthcare system. Given the effects of COVID-19 on pulmonary tissues, chest radiographic imaging has become a necessity for screening and monitoring the disease. Numerous studies have proposed Deep Learning approaches for the automatic diagnosis of COVID-19. Although these methods achieved astonishing performance in detection, they have used limited chest X-ray (CXR) repositories for evaluation, usually with a few hundred COVID-19 CXR images only. Thus, such data scarcity prevents reliable evaluation with the potential of overfitting. In addition, most studies showed no or limited capability in infection localization and severity grading of COVID-19 pneumonia. In this study, we address this urgent need by proposing a systematic and unified approach for lung segmentation and COVID-19 localization with infection quantification from CXR images. To accomplish this, we have constructed the largest benchmark dataset with 33,920 CXR images, including 11,956 COVID-19 samples, where the annotation of ground-truth lung segmentation masks is performed on CXRs by a novel human-machine collaborative approach. An extensive set of experiments was performed using the state-of-the-art segmentation networks, U-Net, U-Net++, and Feature Pyramid Networks (FPN). The developed network, after an extensive iterative process, reached a superior performance for lung region segmentation with Intersection over Union (IoU) of 96.11% and Dice Similarity Coefficient (DSC) of 97.99%. Furthermore, COVID-19 infections of various shapes and types were reliably localized with 83.05% IoU and 88.21% DSC. Finally, the proposed approach has achieved an outstanding COVID-19 detection performance with both sensitivity and specificity values above 99%.
The COVID-19 pandemic is causing a major outbreak in more than 150 countries around the world, having a severe impact on the health and life of many people globally. One of the crucial step in fighting COVID-19 is the ability to detect the infected patients early enough, and put them under special care. Detecting this disease from radiography and radiology images is perhaps one of the fastest ways to diagnose the patients. Some of the early studies showed specific abnormalities in the chest radiograms of patients infected with COVID-19. Inspired by earlier works, we study the application of deep learning models to detect COVID-19 patients from their chest radiography images. We first prepare a dataset of 5,000 Chest X-rays from the publicly available datasets. Images exhibiting COVID-19 disease presence were identified by board-certified radiologist. Transfer learning on a subset of 2,000 radiograms was used to train four popular convolutional neural networks, including ResNet18, ResNet50, SqueezeNet, and DenseNet-121, to identify COVID-19 disease in the analyzed chest X-ray images. We evaluated these models on the remaining 3,000 images, and most of these networks achieved a sensitivity rate of 98% ($pm$ 3%), while having a specificity rate of around 90%. Besides sensitivity and specificity rates, we also present the receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve, precision-recall curve, average prediction, and confusion matrix of each model. We also used a technique to generate heatmaps of lung regions potentially infected by COVID-19 and show that the generated heatmaps contain most of the infected areas annotated by our board certified radiologist. While the achieved performance is very encouraging, further analysis is required on a larger set of COVID-19 images, to have a more reliable estimation of accuracy rates. The dataset, model implementations (in PyTorch), and evaluations, are all made publicly available for research community at https://github.com/shervinmin/DeepCovid.git