No Arabic abstract
The current COVID-19 pandemic has motivated the researchers to use artificial intelligence techniques for a potential alternative to reverse transcription-polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR) due to the limited scale of testing. The chest X-ray (CXR) is one of the alternatives to achieve fast diagnosis but the unavailability of large-scale annotated data makes the clinical implementation of machine learning-based COVID detection difficult. Another issue is the usage of ImageNet pre-trained networks which does not extract reliable feature representations from medical images. In this paper, we propose the use of hierarchical convolutional network (HCN) architecture to naturally augment the data along with diversified features. The HCN uses the first convolution layer from COVIDNet followed by the convolutional layers from well-known pre-trained networks to extract the features. The use of the convolution layer from COVIDNet ensures the extraction of representations relevant to the CXR modality. We also propose the use of ECOC for encoding multiclass problems to binary classification for improving the recognition performance. Experimental results show that HCN architecture is capable of achieving better results in comparison to the existing studies. The proposed method can accurately triage potential COVID-19 patients through CXR images for sharing the testing load and increasing the testing capacity.
Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) has emerged the need for computer-aided diagnosis with automatic, accurate, and fast algorithms. Recent studies have applied Machine Learning algorithms for COVID-19 diagnosis over chest X-ray (CXR) images. However, the data scarcity in these studies prevents a reliable evaluation with the potential of overfitting and limits the performance of deep networks. Moreover, these networks can discriminate COVID-19 pneumonia usually from healthy subjects only or occasionally, from limited pneumonia types. Thus, there is a need for a robust and accurate COVID-19 detector evaluated over a large CXR dataset. To address this need, in this study, we propose a reliable COVID-19 detection network: ReCovNet, which can discriminate COVID-19 pneumonia from 14 different thoracic diseases and healthy subjects. To accomplish this, we have compiled the largest COVID-19 CXR dataset: QaTa-COV19 with 124,616 images including 4603 COVID-19 samples. The proposed ReCovNet achieved a detection performance with 98.57% sensitivity and 99.77% specificity.
With a Coronavirus disease (COVID-19) case count exceeding 10 million worldwide, there is an increased need for a diagnostic capability. The main variables in increasing diagnostic capability are reduced cost, turnaround or diagnosis time, and upfront equipment cost and accessibility. Two candidates for machine learning COVID-19 diagnosis are Computed Tomography (CT) scans and plain chest X-rays. While CT scans score higher in sensitivity, they have a higher cost, maintenance requirement, and turnaround time as compared to plain chest X-rays. The use of portable chest X-radiograph (CXR) is recommended by the American College of Radiology (ACR) since using CT places a massive burden on radiology services. Therefore, X-ray imagery paired with machine learning techniques is proposed a first-line triage tool for COVID-19 diagnostics. In this paper we propose a computer-aided diagnosis (CAD) to accurately classify chest X-ray scans of COVID-19 and normal subjects by fine-tuning several neural networks (ResNet18, ResNet50, DenseNet201) pre-trained on the ImageNet dataset. These neural networks are fused in a parallel architecture and the voting criteria are applied in the final classification decision between the candidate object classes where the output of each neural network is representing a single vote. Several experiments are conducted on the weakly labeled COVID-19-CT-CXR dataset consisting of 263 COVID-19 CXR images extracted from PubMed Central Open Access subsets combined with 25 normal classification CXR images. These experiments show an optimistic result and a capability of the proposed model to outperforming many state-of-the-art algorithms on several measures. Using k-fold cross-validation and a bagging classifier ensemble, we achieve an accuracy of 99.7% and a sensitivity of 100%.
The novel corona-virus disease (COVID-19) pandemic has caused a major outbreak in more than 200 countries around the world, leading to a severe impact on the health and life of many people globally. As of Aug 25th of 2020, more than 20 million people are infected, and more than 800,000 death are reported. Computed Tomography (CT) images can be used as a as an alternative to the time-consuming reverse transcription polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR) test, to detect COVID-19. In this work we developed a deep learning framework to predict COVID-19 from CT images. We propose to use an attentional convolution network, which can focus on the infected areas of chest, enabling it to perform a more accurate prediction. We trained our model on a dataset of more than 2000 CT images, and report its performance in terms of various popular metrics, such as sensitivity, specificity, area under the curve, and also precision-recall curve, and achieve very promising results. We also provide a visualization of the attention maps of the model for several test images, and show that our model is attending to the infected regions as intended. In addition to developing a machine learning modeling framework, we also provide the manual annotation of the potentionally infected regions of chest, with the help of a board-certified radiologist, and make that publicly available for other researchers.
The exponential increase in COVID-19 patients is overwhelming healthcare systems across the world. With limited testing kits, it is impossible for every patient with respiratory illness to be tested using conventional techniques (RT-PCR). The tests also have long turn-around time, and limited sensitivity. Detecting possible COVID-19 infections on Chest X-Ray may help quarantine high risk patients while test results are awaited. X-Ray machines are already available in most healthcare systems, and with most modern X-Ray systems already digitized, there is no transportation time involved for the samples either. In this work we propose the use of chest X-Ray to prioritize the selection of patients for further RT-PCR testing. This may be useful in an inpatient setting where the present systems are struggling to decide whether to keep the patient in the ward along with other patients or isolate them in COVID-19 areas. It would also help in identifying patients with high likelihood of COVID with a false negative RT-PCR who would need repeat testing. Further, we propose the use of modern AI techniques to detect the COVID-19 patients using X-Ray images in an automated manner, particularly in settings where radiologists are not available, and help make the proposed testing technology scalable. We present CovidAID: COVID-19 AI Detector, a novel deep neural network based model to triage patients for appropriate testing. On the publicly available covid-chestxray-dataset [2], our model gives 90.5% accuracy with 100% sensitivity (recall) for the COVID-19 infection. We significantly improve upon the results of Covid-Net [10] on the same dataset.
Computer-aided diagnosis has become a necessity for accurate and immediate coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) detection to aid treatment and prevent the spread of the virus. Numerous studies have proposed to use Deep Learning techniques for COVID-19 diagnosis. However, they have used very limited chest X-ray (CXR) image repositories for evaluation with a small number, a few hundreds, of COVID-19 samples. Moreover, these methods can neither localize nor grade the severity of COVID-19 infection. For this purpose, recent studies proposed to explore the activation maps of deep networks. However, they remain inaccurate for localizing the actual infestation making them unreliable for clinical use. This study proposes a novel method for the joint localization, severity grading, and detection of COVID-19 from CXR images by generating the so-called infection maps. To accomplish this, we have compiled the largest dataset with 119,316 CXR images including 2951 COVID-19 samples, where the annotation of the ground-truth segmentation masks is performed on CXRs by a novel collaborative human-machine approach. Furthermore, we publicly release the first CXR dataset with the ground-truth segmentation masks of the COVID-19 infected regions. A detailed set of experiments show that state-of-the-art segmentation networks can learn to localize COVID-19 infection with an F1-score of 83.20%, which is significantly superior to the activation maps created by the previous methods. Finally, the proposed approach achieved a COVID-19 detection performance with 94.96% sensitivity and 99.88% specificity.