No Arabic abstract
Despite tremendous efforts, it is very challenging to generate a robust model to assist in the accurate quantification assessment of COVID-19 on chest CT images. Due to the nature of blurred boundaries, the supervised segmentation methods usually suffer from annotation biases. To support unbiased lesion localisation and to minimise the labeling costs, we propose a data-driven framework supervised by only image-level labels. The framework can explicitly separate potential lesions from original images, with the help of a generative adversarial network and a lesion-specific decoder. Experiments on two COVID-19 datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed framework and its superior performance to several existing methods.
Segmentation of infected areas in chest CT volumes is of great significance for further diagnosis and treatment of COVID-19 patients. Due to the complex shapes and varied appearances of lesions, a large number of voxel-level labeled samples are generally required to train a lesion segmentation network, which is a main bottleneck for developing deep learning based medical image segmentation algorithms. In this paper, we propose a weakly-supervised lesion segmentation framework by embedding the Generative Adversarial training process into the Segmentation Network, which is called GASNet. GASNet is optimized to segment the lesion areas of a COVID-19 CT by the segmenter, and to replace the abnormal appearance with a generated normal appearance by the generator, so that the restored CT volumes are indistinguishable from healthy CT volumes by the discriminator. GASNet is supervised by chest CT volumes of many healthy and COVID-19 subjects without voxel-level annotations. Experiments on three public databases show that when using as few as one voxel-level labeled sample, the performance of GASNet is comparable to fully-supervised segmentation algorithms trained on dozens of voxel-level labeled samples.
Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) has spread aggressively across the world causing an existential health crisis. Thus, having a system that automatically detects COVID-19 in tomography (CT) images can assist in quantifying the severity of the illness. Unfortunately, labelling chest CT scans requires significant domain expertise, time, and effort. We address these labelling challenges by only requiring point annotations, a single pixel for each infected region on a CT image. This labeling scheme allows annotators to label a pixel in a likely infected region, only taking 1-3 seconds, as opposed to 10-15 seconds to segment a region. Conventionally, segmentation models train on point-level annotations using the cross-entropy loss function on these labels. However, these models often suffer from low precision. Thus, we propose a consistency-based (CB) loss function that encourages the output predictions to be consistent with spatial transformations of the input images. The experiments on 3 open-source COVID-19 datasets show that this loss function yields significant improvement over conventional point-level loss functions and almost matches the performance of models trained with full supervision with much less human effort. Code is available at: url{https://github.com/IssamLaradji/covid19_weak_supervision}.
The novel coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) characterized by atypical pneumonia has caused millions of deaths worldwide. Automatically segmenting lesions from chest Computed Tomography (CT) is a promising way to assist doctors in COVID-19 screening, treatment planning, and follow-up monitoring. However, voxel-wise annotations are extremely expert-demanding and scarce, especially when it comes to novel diseases, while an abundance of unlabeled data could be available. To tackle the challenge of limited annotations, in this paper, we propose an uncertainty-guided dual-consistency learning network (UDC-Net) for semi-supervised COVID-19 lesion segmentation from CT images. Specifically, we present a dual-consistency learning scheme that simultaneously imposes image transformation equivalence and feature perturbation invariance to effectively harness the knowledge from unlabeled data. We then quantify the segmentation uncertainty in two forms and employ them together to guide the consistency regularization for more reliable unsupervised learning. Extensive experiments showed that our proposed UDC-Net improves the fully supervised method by 6.3% in Dice and outperforms other competitive semi-supervised approaches by significant margins, demonstrating high potential in real-world clinical practice.
One of the key challenges in the battle against the Coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic is to detect and quantify the severity of the disease in a timely manner. Computed tomographies (CT) of the lungs are effective for assessing the state of the infection. Unfortunately, labeling CT scans can take a lot of time and effort, with up to 150 minutes per scan. We address this challenge introducing a scalable, fast, and accurate active learning system that accelerates the labeling of CT scan images. Conventionally, active learning methods require the labelers to annotate whole images with full supervision, but that can lead to wasted efforts as many of the annotations could be redundant. Thus, our system presents the annotator with unlabeled regions that promise high information content and low annotation cost. Further, the system allows annotators to label regions using point-level supervision, which is much cheaper to acquire than per-pixel annotations. Our experiments on open-source COVID-19 datasets show that using an entropy-based method to rank unlabeled regions yields to significantly better results than random labeling of these regions. Also, we show that labeling small regions of images is more efficient than labeling whole images. Finally, we show that with only 7% of the labeling effort required to label the whole training set gives us around 90% of the performance obtained by training the model on the fully annotated training set. Code is available at: url{https://github.com/IssamLaradji/covid19_active_learning}.
The Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) has rapidly spread all over the world since its first report in December 2019 and thoracic computed tomography (CT) has become one of the main tools for its diagnosis. In recent years, deep learning-based approaches have shown impressive performance in myriad image recognition tasks. However, they usually require a large number of annotated data for training. Inspired by Ground Glass Opacity (GGO), a common finding in COIVD-19 patients CT scans, we proposed in this paper a novel self-supervised pretraining method based on pseudo lesions generation and restoration for COVID-19 diagnosis. We used Perlin noise, a gradient noise based mathematical model, to generate lesion-like patterns, which were then randomly pasted to the lung regions of normal CT images to generate pseudo COVID-19 images. The pairs of normal and pseudo COVID-19 images were then used to train an encoder-decoder architecture based U-Net for image restoration, which does not require any labelled data. The pretrained encoder was then fine-tuned using labelled data for COVID-19 diagnosis task. Two public COVID-19 diagnosis datasets made up of CT images were employed for evaluation. Comprehensive experimental results demonstrated that the proposed self-supervised learning approach could extract better feature representation for COVID-19 diagnosis and the accuracy of the proposed method outperformed the supervised model pretrained on large scale images by 6.57% and 3.03% on SARS-CoV-2 dataset and Jinan COVID-19 dataset, respectively.