A radiomics-based model for the outcome prediction in COVID-19 positive patients through deep learning with both longitudinal chest x-ray and chest computed tomography images

The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic had a major impact on global health and was associated with millions of deaths worldwide. During the pandemic, imaging characteristics of chest X-ray (CXR) and chest computed tomography (CT) played an important role in the screening, diagnosis and monitoring the disease progression. Various studies suggested that quantitative image analysis methods including artificial intelligence and radiomics can greatly boost the value of imaging in the management of COVID-19. However, few studies have explored the use of longitudinal multi-modal medical images with varying visit intervals for outcome prediction in COVID-19 patients. This study aims to explore the potential of longitudinal multimodal radiomics in predicting the outcome of COVID-19 patients by integrating both CXR and CT images with variable visit intervals through deep learning. 2274 patients who underwent CXR and/or CT scans during disease progression were selected for this study. Of these, 946 patients were treated at the University of Pennsylvania Health System (UPHS) and the remaining 1328 patients were acquired at Stony Brook University (SBU) and curated by the Medical Imaging and Data Resource Center (MIDRC). 532 radiomic features were extracted with the Cancer Imaging Phenomics Toolkit (CaPTk) from the lung regions in CXR and CT images at all visits. We employed two commonly used deep learning algorithms to analyze the longitudinal multimodal features, and evaluated the prediction results based on the area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUC). Our models achieved testing AUC scores of 0.816 and 0.836, respectively, for the prediction of mortality. © 2023 SPIE.

Detecting Coronavirus (COVID -19) Disease Cues from Chest Radiography Images

This paper proposes a deep learning-based approach to detect COVID-19 infections in lung tissues from chest Computed Tomography (CT) images. A two-stage classification model is designed to identify the infection from CT scans of COVID-19 and Community Acquired Pneumonia (CAP) patients. The proposed neural model named, Residual C-NiN uses a modified convolutional neural network (CNN) with residual connections and a Network-in-Network (NiN) architecture for COVID-19 and CAP detection. The model is trained with the Signal Processing Grand Challenge (SPGC) 2021 COVID dataset. The proposed neural model achieves a slice-level classification accuracy of 93.54% on chest CT images and patient-level classification accuracy of 86.59% with class-wise sensitivity of 92.72%, 55.55%, and 95.83% for COVID-19, CAP, and Normal classes, respectively. Experimental results show the benefit of adding NiN and residual connections in the proposed neural architecture. Experiments conducted on the dataset show significant improvement over the existing state-of-the-art methods reported in the literature. © 2022 ACM.

Semi-Supervised Modified-UNet for Lung Infection Image Segmentation

Automatic lung infection segmentation in computed tomography (CT) scans can offer great assistance in radiological diagnosis by improving accuracy and reducing time required for diagnosis. The biggest challenges for deep learning (DL) models in segmenting infection region are the high variances in infection characteristics, fuzzy boundaries between infected and normal tissues, and the troubles in getting large number of annotated data for training. To resolve such issues, we propose a Modified U-Net (Mod-UNet) model with minor architectural changes and significant modifications in the training process of vanilla 2D UNet. As part of these modifications, we updated the loss function, optimization function, and regularization methods, added a learning rate scheduler and applied advanced data augmentation techniques. Segmentation results on two Covid-19 Lung CT segmentation datasets show that the performance of Mod-UNet is considerably better than the baseline U-Net. Furthermore, to mitigate the issue of lack of annotated data, the Mod-UNet is used in a semi-supervised framework (Semi-Mod-UNet) which works on a random sampling approach to progressively enlarge the training dataset from a large pool of unannotated CT slices. Exhaustive experiments on the two Covid-19 CT segmentation datasets and on a real lung CT volume show that the Mod-UNet and Semi-Mod-UNet significantly outperform other state-of-theart approaches in automated lung infection segmentation. IEEE

Fine-Tuning ResNet-152V2 for COVID-19 Recognition in Chest Computed Tomography Images

The epidemic Covid-19 has extended to majority of nations. This pandemic is due to a contagious condition 'SARS-CoV-2', was identified by the the International Health association. In order to diagnosis this virus from 2D chest computed tomography (CT) images, we applied three different transfer learning algorithms: $VGG-19, ResNet-152V2$ and a Fine-Tuned version of $ResNet-152V2$. The different transfer learning models are used on three hundred and four exams where 74 are normal cases, 60 are community-acquired pneumonia (CAP) cases and 169 were confirmed corona-virus cases. The best accuracy value is reached by the fine-tuned $ResNet-152v2$ by 75% against 70% for the basic $ResNet-152v2$ and 66% for the $VGG-19$. © 2022 IEEE.

An observer comparison study to evaluate a machine learning model to quantify the infected pneumonia on lung CT images

Quantification of infected lung volume using computed tomography (CT) images can play a critical role in predicting the severity of pulmonary infectious disease. Manual segmentation of infected areas from several CT image slices, however, is not efficient and viable in clinical practice. To assist clinicians in overcoming this challenge, we developed a new method to automatically segment and quantify the percentage of the infected lung volume. First, we used a public dataset of 20 COVID-19 patients, which consists of manually annotated lung and infection masks, to train a new joint deep learning (DL) model for lung and infection segmentation. As for lung segmentation, a Mask-RCNN model was applied to the lung volume with a novel postprocessing technique. Following that, an ensemble model with a customized residual attention UNet model and feature pyramid network (FPN) models was employed for infection segmentation. Next, we assembled another set of 80 CT scans of Covid-19 patients. Two chest radiologists manually evaluated each CT scan and reported the infected lung volume percentage using a customized graphical user interface (GUI). The developed DL-model was also employed to process these CT images. Then, we compared the agreement between the radiologist (manual) and model-based (automated) percentages of diseased regions. Additionally, the GUI was used to let radiologists rate acceptance of the DL-model generated segmentation results. Analyzing the results demonstrate that the agreement between manual and automated segmentation is >95% in 28 testing cases. Furthermore, >53% of testing cases received the top assessment rating scores from two radiologists (between four-five- score). Thus, this study illustrates the feasibility of developing a DL-model based automated tool to effectively provide quantitative evaluation of infected lung regions to assist in improving the efficiency of radiologists in infection diagnosis. © COPYRIGHT SPIE. Downloading of the is permitted for personal use only.

Efficient Transfer Learning for COVID-19 Diagnosis using X-Ray and Computed Tomography Images

In this work, we aim to find an effective model to diagnose COVID-19 by using a Transfer Learning (TL) model. The purpose is to classify COVID-19 infected persons from chest X-Ray (XR) and Computed Tomography (CT) images. Several Transfer Learning models have been studied to find the most efficient and effective among them. The proposed approach is based on Tensorflow and the architecture uses the MobileNet_V2 model. The datasets that are used in this study are publicly available. In order to train and evaluate our proposed model, we collected the CT scans dataset of 8000 images with two classes of infected and normal lungs, and the XR dataset contains 616 images. Two experiments are conducted with samples of different sizes to evaluate the model using google colab. The results revealed that the performance of our model MobileNet_V2 is highest with validation accuracy for XR and CT scans images: Val_AccuracyXR =96.77% and Val_AccuracyCT =99.67%, and test time for XR and CT scans images: TXR =0.18s, tCT=0.03s respectively. © 2022 IEEE.

Study of Deep Learning Approaches for Diagnosing Covid-19 Disease using Chest CT Images

Since March 2020, the World Health Organization (WHO) has declared COVID-19 a pandemic. An evolving viral infection with respiratory tropism causes atypical pneumonia. Experts believe that detecting COVID-19 early stage is crucial. Early diagnosis and tracking techniques have become increasingly important to ensure an accelerated treatment process and avoid virus spread. Images from Computed Tomography (CT) scans can provide quick and precise COVID-19 screening. A subdivision of Machine Learning (ML) called Deep Learning (DL) can improve diagnostic accuracy and speed by automating screening via medical imaging in collaborative efforts with radiologists and physicians This study aims to investigate the recently popularized and extensively discussed deep learning algorithms for COVID-19 diagnosis in connection to the sequence phases involved in image processing. Getting rid of the noise in these images requires some preprocessing. Histogram equalization, fuzzy histogram equalisation, Adaptive Histogram Equalization (AHE) and Contrast Limited Adaptive Histogram Equalization (CLAHE) are used to improve the image quality and therefore increase the identification of the image. Afterwards, necessary features for disease detection are segmented using various deep models like U-Net, U-Net + FPN (Feature Pyramid Network), COVID-SegNet and Dense GAN. Once these distinct deep characteristics have been identified, they are extracted using a variety of different deep models. Finally, an illness is diagnosed using popular models such as SVM, ResNet-50, AlexNet, VGG16, DenseNet, and SqueezeNet. The deep learning models with a better optimization algorithm to be effective in the diagnosis of COVID-19 and also obtain a reduced and efficient feature set for image classification and feature extraction. © 2023 IEEE.

Segmentation of covid-19 lesions based on deep learning

Accurate segmentation of infected areas in computed tomography (CT) images of the lungs of patients with novel coronavirus pneumonia (COVID-19) can assist doctors in diagnosing the patient's condition. This paper proposes an end-to-end new coronary pneumonia lung CT image segmentation model: SCA-Unet, which introduces the Cascading Context Module in the skip connection to expand the receptive field while retaining the context information of different layers to the greatest extent. At the same time, an Adaptive Select Module is added before each decoding layer to enhance the model's attention to segmentation targets and capture long-range dependencies. Experiments show that the model can better segment the infected area of COVID-19 patients, especially the infected area that is not easy to be segmented in the early stage, and each segmentation index is better than multiple comparison methods. © 2022 IEEE.

COVIDEffiNet: Pulmonary Diseases and COVID-19 Detection from Chest Radiographs Using EfficientNet Deep Learning Model

There have been attempts made previously to classify and determine the diagnosis of a disease of a patient based on the X-rays and computed tomography images of various parts of the body. In the field of lung disease diagnosis, there have been attempts to identify lungs infected with pneumonia, COVID-19, and tuberculosis, either individually classifying them into two groups of positive and negative of the given disease or in groups with multiple classes. These methods and approaches have used various deep learning models like CNNs, ResNet50, VGG19, Inception V3, MobileNet_V2, hybrid models, and ensemble learning methods. In this paper, we have proposed a model that takes an X-ray image of the lungs of the patients as input and classifies the result as one of the following classes: tuberculosis, pneumonia, COVID-19, or normal, that is, healthy lungs. What we have used here is transfer learning, with our base model being EfficientNet which gives an accuracy of 93%. For this, we have used different datasets of X-ray images of patients with different lung ailments, namely pneumonia, tuberculosis, and COVID. The dataset consists of images in four categories, the above-mentioned three diseases and a fourth category of normal healthy lungs. © 2023, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd.

Automated diagnosis of COVID stages using texture-based Gabor features in variational mode decomposition from CT images

COVID-19 is a deadly and fast-spreading disease that makes early death by affecting human organs, primarily the lungs. The detection of COVID in the early stages is crucial as it may help restrict the spread of the progress. The traditional and trending tools are manual, time-inefficient, and less accurate. Hence, an automated diagnosis of COVID is needed to detect COVID in the early stages. Recently, several methods for exploiting computed tomography (CT) scan pictures to detect COVID have been developed;however, none are effective in detecting COVID at the preliminary phase. We propose a method based on two-dimensional variational mode decomposition in this work. This proposed approach decomposes pre-processed CT scan pictures into sub-bands. The texture-based Gabor filter bank extracts the relevant features, and the student's t-value is used to recognize robust traits. After that, linear discriminative analysis (LDA) reduces the dimensionality of features and provides ranks for robust features. Only the first 14 LDA features are qualified for classification. Finally, the least square- support vector machine (SVM) (radial basis function) classifier distinguishes between COVID and non-COVID CT lung images. The results of the trial showed that our model outperformed cutting-edge methods for COVID classification. Using tenfold cross-validation, this model achieved an improved classification accuracy of 93.96%, a specificity of 95.59%, and an F1 score of 93%. To validate our proposed methodology, we conducted different relative experiments with deep learning and traditional machine learning-based models like random forest, K-nearest neighbor, SVM, convolutional neural network, and recurrent neural network. The proposed model is ready to help radiologists identify diseases daily. © 2023 Wiley Periodicals LLC.

On the Use of Conventional Neural Networks for COVID-19 Detection in CT-Scan Images: A Comparative Study and Performance Analysis

This paper presents a comprehensive study on deep learning for COVID-19 detection using CT-scan images. The proposed study investigates several Conventional Neural Networks (CNN) architectures such as AlexNet, ZFNet, VGGNet, and ResNet, and thus proposed a hybrid methodology base on merging the relevant optimized architectures considered for detecting COVID-19 from CT-scan images. The proposed methods have been assessed on real datasets, and the experimental results conducted have shown the effectiveness of the proposed methods, allowing achieving a higher accuracy up to 99%. © 2022 IEEE.

Automatic detection of Covid-19 based on lung CT images using Deep Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN)

In recent years, the COVID-19 pandemic has spread all over the world. Due to its rapid transmission, techniques that automatically detect COVID-19 infections and distinguish it from other forms of pneumonia are crucial. The scientific community has embarked on finding solutions to quick detection of COVID-19 through implementation of deep learning(DL) techniques that can diagnose COVID-19 using computed tomography (CT) lung scans. The use of CT images has been widely accepted in medical imaging and it is a pertinent screening tool due to its higher sensitivity in recognizing early pneumonic changes. Also, most developed DL models developed have been end-to-end from feature extraction to categorization of the COVID19 infected images. The proposed model results showed high accuracy rates on both training and testing of the model in COVID-19 classification. A customised ResNet-50 architecture has the best results in classifying the images and achieved state of art accuracy of 97% on training and testing using the COVID dataset with 200 epochs. This work presented a computationally efficient and highly accurate model for multi-class classification of normal and infected individuals. The model can help in effective early screening of COVID-19 cases hence reducing the burden on healthcare systems. © 2022 IEEE.

SMA-Net: Sobel Operator Combined with Multi-attention Networks for COVID-19 Lesion Segmentation

Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) has been spreading since late 2019, leading the world into a serious health crisis. To control the spread rate of infection, identifying patients accurately and quickly is the most crucial step. Computed tomography (CT) images of the chest are an important basis for diagnosing COVID-19. They also allow doctors to understand the details of the lung infection. However, manual segmentation of infected areas in CT images is time-consuming and laborious. With its excellent feature extraction capabilities, deep learning-based method has been widely used for automatic lesion segmentation of COVID-19 CT images. But, the segmentation accuracy of these methods is still limited. To effectively quantify the severity of lung infections, we propose a Sobel operator combined with Multi-Attention networks for COVID-19 lesion segmentation (SMA-Net). In our SMA-Net, an edge feature fusion module uses Sobel operator to add edge detail information to the input image. To guide the network to focus on key regions, the SMA-Net introduces a self-attentive channel attention mechanism and a spatial linear attention mechanism. In addition, Tversky loss function is adopted for the segmentation network for small size of lesions. Comparative experiments on COVID-19 public datasets show that the average Dice similarity coefficient (DSC) and joint intersection over Union (IOU) of proposed SMA-Net are 86.1% and 77.8%, respectively, which are better than most existing neural networks used for COVID-19 lesion segmentation. © 2023, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd.

A Lightweight Segmentation Network Based on Weak Supervision for COVID-19 Detection

The Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) outbreak in late 2019 threatens global health security. Computed tomography (CT) can provide richer information for the diagnosis and treatment of COVID-19. Unfortunately, labeling of COVID-19 lesion chest CT images is an expensive affair. We solved the challenge of chest CT labeling by simply marking point annotations to the lesion areas, i.e., by marking individual pixels for each lesion area in the chest CT scan. It takes only a few seconds to complete the labeling using this labeling strategy. We also designed a lightweight segmentation model with approximately 10% of the number of model parameters of the conventional model. So, the proposed model segmented the lesions of a single image in only 0.05 s. In order to obtain the shape and size of lesions from point labels, the convex-hull based segmentation (CHS) loss function is proposed in this paper, which enables the model to obtain an approximate fully supervised performance on point labels. The experiments were compared with the current state-of-the-art (SOTA) point label segmentation methods on the COVID-19-CT-Seg dataset, and our model showed a large improvement: IoU improved by 28.85%, DSC improved by 28.91%, Sens improved by 13.75%, Spes improved by 1.18%, and MAE decreased by 1.10%. Experiments on the dataset show that the proposed model combines the advantages of lightweight and weak supervision, resulting in more accurate COVID-19 lesion segmentation results while having only a 10% performance difference with the fully supervised approach. © 2023, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd.

Analysis on Chest X-ray and Computed Tomography Images to Detect COVID-19 Based on Deep Learning Techniques

More than 6.3 million individuals have died as a result of the Corona Virus Disease 2019 (COVID-19), which spoiled many more human health globally. Since COVID-19 is a pandemic that is rapidly spreading, early discovery is essential to halting the infection's spread. Images of the lungs are utilised to identify coronavirus infection. For the identification of Corona Virus Disease, chest X-ray (CXR) and computed tomography (CT) images are available. Deep learning methods are proved to be effective and perform better in medical imaging applications. This study examines lung CT pictures, classifies and segments them, and uses the results to identify whether a patient tested is affected by COVID-19 or not using Deep learning techniques. The COVID detection performance of the deep learning architectures GG19, MobileNet, COVID-Net (PEPX), Squeez Net, U-Net, DarkNet and VGG16 are analysed - it was shown that U-Net combined VGG16 (acc98.89%) and VGG19 (acc-98.05%) performs the best, followed by MobileNet and QueezNet. © 2022 IEEE.

A New Classification Method for COVID-19 CT Images Based on Transfer Learning and Attention Mechanism

Nowadays, the typical tools employed in the diagnosis of the pandemic coronavirus disease, COVID-19, including Real-Time Reverse Transcription Polymerase Chain Reaction (RT-PCR) and Polymerase Chain Reaction (PCR), which are less sensitive, time-consuming, and demanding assistance from expert medical personnel assistance. Computed tomography (CT) as the artificial intelligence (AI) technological utilized in high accurate COVID-19 infection screening in a short amount of time is tremendously helpful. To address those limitations mentioned above, In this paper, a robust, optimized model for detection of the COVID-19 automatically in digital CT images is proposed utilizing the technique based on transfer learning and attention mechanism derived from deep learning. MobileNet-V1 architecture of transfer learning was applied to make the model more lightweight and reduce the computation, while setting to be the pre-trained mode meanwhile. In addition, the attention mechanism of SENet's called Squeeze-and-Excitation (SE) module was employed to let it learn the significance of various channel features automatically. Two experiments, with transfer learning and attention mechanism technique or not, were employed to assess the function of the model. Noteworthy, the accuracy, precision, recall, and F1-score were 95.97%, 93.47%, 94.27%, and 94.01% respectively. The results reveal that the optimized approach outperform the comparative models. © 2022 IEEE.

A Novel Automated Classification and Segmentation for COVID-19 using 3D CT Scans

Medical image classification and segmentation based on deep learning (DL) are emergency research topics for diagnosing variant viruses of the current COVID-19 situation. In COVID-19 computed tomography (CT) images of the lungs, ground glass turbidity is the most common finding that requires specialist diagnosis. Based on this situation, some researchers propose the relevant DL models which can replace professional diagnostic specialists in clinics when lacking expertise. However, although DL methods have a stunning performance in medical image processing, the limited datasets can be a challenge in developing the accuracy of diagnosis at the human level. In addition, deep learning algorithms face the challenge of classifying and segmenting medical images in three or even multiple dimensions and maintaining high accuracy rates. Consequently, with a guaranteed high level of accuracy, our model can classify the patients' CT images into three types: Normal, Pneumonia and COVID. Subsequently, two datasets are used for segmentation, one of the datasets even has only a limited amount of data (20 cases). Our system combined the classification model and the segmentation model together, a fully integrated diagnostic model was built on the basis of ResNet50 and 3D U-Net algorithm. By feeding with different datasets, the COVID image segmentation of the infected area will be carried out according to classification results. Our model achieves 94.52% accuracy in the classification of lung lesions by 3 types: COVID, Pneumonia and Normal. For 2 labels (ground truth, lung lesions) segmentation, the model gets 99.57% of accuracy, 0.2191 of train loss and 0.78 ± 0.03 of MeanDice±Std, while the 4 labels (ground truth, left lung, right lung, lung lesions) segmentation achieves 98.89% of accuracy, 0.1132 of train loss and 0.83 ± 0.13 of MeanDice±Std. For future medical use, embedding the model into the medical facilities might be an efficient way of assisting or substituting doctors with diagnoses, therefore, a broader range of the problem of variant viruses in the COVID-19 situation may also be successfully solved. © 2022 IEEE.

Detecting COVID-19 on CT Images with Impulsive-Backpropagation Neural Networks

This paper presents an impulsive-backpropagation neural network (IBNN) based learning algorithm for detecting Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19), by classifying chest computed tomography (CT) images. Inspired by the nerve impulses in brain networks, the IBNN algorithm consists of two parts: a multi-layered network of impulsive neurons and a gradient decent backpropagation mechanism. The effectiveness of the IBNN algorithm is validated on clinical COVID-19 database, and a classification accuracy of 98.19% is achieved. It is further demonstrated by comparative studies that the IBNN may outperform some other learning algorithms through the integration of nerve impulses and backpropagation. Considering the intricate attributes of the chest CT scan images, the IBNN algorithm also exhibits a potential capacity of pattern recognition on complicated samples. © 2022 IEEE.

DeepChestNet: Artificial intelligence approach for COVID-19 detection on computed tomography images

The conventional approach for identifying ground glass opacities (GGO) in medical imaging is to use a convolutional neural network (CNN), a subset of artificial intelligence, which provides promising performance in COVID-19 detection. However, CNN is still limited in capturing structured relationships of GGO as the texture and shape of the GGO can be confused with other structures in the image. In this paper, a novel framework called DeepChestNet is proposed that leverages structured relationships by jointly performing segmentation and classification on the lung, pulmonary lobe, and GGO, leading to enhanced detection of COVID-19 with findings. The performance of DeepChestNet in terms of dice similarity coefficient is 99.35%, 99.73%, and 97.89% for the lung, pulmonary lobe, and GGO segmentation, respectively. The experimental investigations on DeepChestNet-Lung, DeepChestNet-Lobe and DeepChestNet-COVID datasets, and comparison with several state-of-the-art approaches reveal the great potential of DeepChestNet for diagnosis of COVID-19 disease. © 2023 Wiley Periodicals LLC.

An Analysis of Image Features Extracted by CNNs to Design Classification Models for COVID-19 and Non-COVID-19.

The SARS-CoV-2 virus causes a respiratory disease in humans, known as COVID-19. The confirmatory diagnostic of this disease occurs through the real-time reverse transcription and polymerase chain reaction test (RT-qPCR). However, the period of obtaining the results limits the application of the mass test. Thus, chest X-ray computed tomography (CT) images are analyzed to help diagnose the disease. However, during an outbreak of a disease that causes respiratory problems, radiologists may be overwhelmed with analyzing medical images. In the literature, some studies used feature extraction techniques based on CNNs, with classification models to identify COVID-19 and non-COVID-19. This work compare the performance of applying pre-trained CNNs in conjunction with classification methods based on machine learning algorithms. The main objective is to analyze the impact of the features extracted by CNNs, in the construction of models to classify COVID-19 and non-COVID-19. A SARS-CoV-2 CT data-set is used in experimental tests. The CNNs implemented are visual geometry group (VGG-16 and VGG-19), inception V3 (IV3), and EfficientNet-B0 (EB0). The classification methods were k-nearest neighbor (KNN), support vector machine (SVM), and explainable deep neural networks (xDNN). In the experiments, the best results were obtained by the EfficientNet model used to extract data and the SVM with an RBF kernel. This approach achieved an average performance of 0.9856 in the precision macro, 0.9853 in the sensitivity macro, 0.9853 in the specificity macro, and 0.9853 in the F1 score macro.