COVID-19 Image Segmentation Algorithms Based on Conditional Generative Adversarial Network

The size and location of the lesions in CT images of novel corona virus pneumonia (COVID-19) change all the time, and the lesion areas have low contrast and blurred boundaries, resulting in difficult segmentation. To solve this problem, a COVID-19 image segmentation algorithm based on conditional generative adversarial network (CGAN) is proposed. Uses the improved DeeplabV3+ network as a generator, which enhances the extraction of multi-scale contextual features, reduces the number of network parameters and improves the training speed. A Markov discriminator with 6 fully convolutional layers is proposed instead of a common discriminator, with the aim of focusing more on the local features of the CT image. By continuously adversarial training between the generator and the discriminator, the network weights are optimised so that the final segmented image generated by the generator is infinitely close to the ground truth. On the COVID-19 CT public dataset, the area under the curve of ROC, F1-Score and dice similarity coefficient achieved 96.64%, 84.15% and 86.14% respectively. The experimental results show that the proposed algorithm is accurate and robust, and it has the possibility of becoming a safe, inexpensive, and time-saving medical assistant tool in clinical diagnosis, which provides a reference for computer-aided diagnosis. © 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

HarDNet and Dual-Code Attention Mechanism based model for medical images segmentation

During the formation of medical images, they are easily disturbed by factors such as acquisition devices and tissue backgrounds, causing problems such as blurred image backgrounds and difficulty in differentiation. In this paper, we combine the HarDNet module and the multi-coding attention mechanism module to optimize the two stages of encoding and decoding to improve the model segmentation performance. In the encoding stage, the HarDNet module extracts medical image feature information to improve the segmentation network operation speed. In the decoding stage, the multi-coding attention module is used to extract both the position feature information and channel feature information of the image to improve the model segmentation effect. Finally, to improve the segmentation accuracy of small targets, the use of Cross Entropy and Dice combination function is proposed as the loss function of this algorithm. The algorithm has experimented on three different types of medical datasets, Kvasir-SEG, ISIC2018, and COVID-19CT. The values of JS were 0.7189, 0.7702, 0.9895, ACC were 0.8964, 0.9491, 0.9965, SENS were 0.7634, 0.8204, 0.9976, PRE were 0.9214, 0.9504, 0.9931. The experimental results showed that the model proposed in this paper achieved excellent segmentation results in all the above evaluation indexes, which can effectively assist doctors to diagnose related diseases quickly and improve the speed of diagnosis and patients’quality of life. Author

U-Net based Semantic Segmentation for Touchless Fingerprint Technology: A Reflective Review

Touch-based fingerprints are widely used in today's world;even with all the success, the touch-based nature of these is a threat, especially in this COVID-19 period. A solution to the same is the introduction of Touchless Fingerprint Technology. The workflow of a touchless system varies vastly from its touch-based counterpart in terms of acquisition, pre-processing, image enhancement, and fingerprint verification. One significant difference is the methods used to segment desired fingerprint regions. This literature focuses on pixel-level classification or semantic segmentation using U-Net, a key yet challenging task. A plethora of semantic segmentation methods have been applied in this field. In this literature, a spectrum of efforts in the field of semantic segmentation using U-Net is investigated along with the components that are integral while training and testing a model, like optimizers, loss functions, and metrics used for evaluation and enumeration of results obtained. © 2022 IEEE.

COVID-19 Instance Segmentation Network Based on Semantic Information Generating Proposals

The CT images of lungs of COVID-19 patients have distinct pathological features, segmenting the lesion area accurately by the method of deep learning, which is of great significance for the diagnosis and treatment of COVID-19 patients. Instance segmentation has higher sensitivity and can output the Bounding Boxes of the lesion region, however, the traditional instance segmentation method is weak in the segmentation of small lesions, and there is still room for improvement in the segmentation accuracy. We propose a instance segmentation network which is called as Semantic R-CNN. Firstly, a semantic segmentation branch is added on the basis of Mask-RCNN, and utilizing the image processing tool Skimage in Python to label the connected domain for the result of semantic segmentation, extracting the rectangular boundaries of connected domain and using them as Proposals, which will replace the Regional Proposal Network in the instance segmentation. Secondly, the Atrous Spatial Pyramid Pooling is introduced into the Feature Pyramid Network, then improving the feature fusion method in FPN. Finally, the cascade method is introduced into the detection branch of the network to optimize the Proposals. Segmentation experiments were carried out on the pathological lesion segmentation data set of CC-CCII, the average accuracy of the semantic segmentation is 40.56mAP, and compared with the Mask-RCNN, it has improved by 9.98mAP. After fusing the results of semantic segmentation and instance segmentation, the Dice coefficient is 80.7%, the sensitivity is 85.8%, and compared with the Inf-Net, it has increased by 1.6% and 8.06% respectively. The proposed network has improved the segmentation accuracy and reduced the false-negatives. © 2022 ACM.

LLDSNet: Limited labeled data segmentation network for COVID-19 CT lesion segmentation

With the COVID-19 outbreak in 2019, the world is facing a major crisis and people's health is at serious risk. Accurate segmentation of lesions in CT images can help doctors understand disease infections, prescribe the right medicine and control patients' conditions. Fast and accurate diagnosis not only can make the limited medical resources get reasonable allocation, but also can control the spread of disease, and computer-aided diagnosis can achieve this purpose, so this paper proposes a deep learning segmentation network LLDSNet based on a small amount of data, which is divided into two modules: contextual feature-aware module (CFAM) and shape edge detection module (SEDM). Due to the different morphology of lesions in different CT, lesions with dispersion, small lesion area and background area imbalance, lesion area and normal area boundary blurred, etc. The problem of lesion segmentation in COVID-19 poses a major challenge. The CFAM can effectively extract the overall and local features, and the SEDM can accurately find the edges of the lesion area to segment the lesions in this area. The hybrid loss function is used to avoid the class imbalance problem and improve the overall network performance. It is demonstrated that LLDSNet dice achieves 0.696 for a small number of data sets, and the best performance compared to five currently popular segmentation networks. © 2023 SPIE.

Multilevel Thresholding of Grayscale Complex Crop Images using Minimum Cross Entropy

Crop image segmentation plays a key step in the field of agriculture. The crop images present near the environs have complex backgrounds and their grayscale histogram is mostly multimodal. Hence, multilevel segmentation of grayscale crop images may be helpful for better analysis. This paper proposed multilevel thresholding of grayscale crop images incorporated with minimum cross entropy as an objective function. The time complexity of this technique increases with the threshold levels. Hence, the coronavirus herd immunity optimizer (CHIO) has been amalgamated with the objective function. This technique improves the image's accuracy. The CHIO is a humanbased algorithm that separates the foreground and background efficiently with multiple thresholds value. The simulation has been performed on grayscale crop images. It is. compared with bacterial foraging algorithm (BFO), and beta differential algorithm (BDE) to validate the accuracy. The results validates that the proposed method outperforms BFO and BDE for grayscale crop images in terms of fidelity parameters. The qualitative and quantitative results evidence the proficiency of suggested method. © 2023 IEEE.

Multi-Attentional U-Net for Medical Image Segmentation

Deep learning (DL) approaches for image segmentation have been gaining state-of-the-art performance in recent years. Particularly, in deep learning, U-Net model has been successfully used in the field of image segmentation. However, traditional U-Net methods extract features, aggregate remote information, and reconstruct images by stacking convolution, pooling, and up sampling blocks. The traditional approach is very inefficient due of the stacked local operators. In this paper, we propose the multi-attentional U-Net that is equipped with non-local blocks based self-attention, channel-attention, and spatial-attention for image segmentation. These blocks can be inserted into U-Net to flexibly aggregate information on the plane and spatial scales. We perform and evaluate the multi-attentional U-Net model on three benchmark data sets, which are COVID-19 segmentation, skin cancer segmentation, thyroid nodules segmentation. Results show that our proposed models achieve better performances with faster computation and fewer parameters. The multi-attention U-Net can improve the medical image segmentation results. © 2022 IEEE.

Deep Learning-and Transfer Learning-based Models for COVID-19 Detection using Radiography Images

Image classification and segmentation techniques are still very popular in the medical field (for healthcare), in which the medical image plays an important role in the detection and screening of diseases. Recently, the spread of new viral diseases, namely Covid-19, requires powerful computer models and rich resources (datasets) to fight this phenomenon. In this study, we propose to examine the CNN Deep Learning algorithm and two Transfer Learning models, namely RestNet50 and MobileNetV2 using the pretrained model of the ImageNet database, experimented on the new dataset (COVID-QU-Ex Dataset 2022) offered by the University of Qatar. These models are tested to classify radiography images into two classes (Covid19 and Normal). The results achieved by CNN (Acc =95.97%), ResNet50 (Acc =95.53%) and MobileNetV2 (Acc =97.32%) show that these algorithms are promising in order to combat this Covid-19 disease by detecting it through thoracic images (Chest X-ray type). © 2023 IEEE.

Improved Residual U-Net for COVID-19 Lung Infection Multi-Class Segmentation in CT Image

COVID-19, the new coronavirus, is a threat to global public health. Today, there is an urgent need for automatic COVID-19 infection detection tools. This work proposes an automatic COVID-19 infection detection system based on CT image segmentation. A deep learning network developed from an improved Residual U-net architecture extracts infected areas from a CT lung image. We tested the system on COVID-19 public CT images. An evaluation using the F1 score, sensitivity, specificity and accuracy proved the effectiveness of the proposed network. Besides, experimental results showed that the proposed network performed well in extracting infection regions so, it can assist experts in COVID-19 infection detection. © 2022 IEEE.

Execution of Market Basket Analysis and Recommendation Systems in Physical Retail Stores to Advance Sales Revenues

In the early months of 2020, pandemic covid-19 hit many parts of the world. Especially developing countries like India observed a negative growth rate in few quarters of last financial year. Retailing is one of the key sectors that contribute to Indian GDP with a share of nearly 10 percent. Hence there is a need for the retail sector to bounce back which is possible with the efficient use of new digital technologies. Market basket analysis is used here to extract the association rules which can be directly used for formulating discount and combo offers. Along with that, these rules can be used to decide the product positioning in the retail store. Items which are bought together can be placed next to each other to increase sales. Recommendation systems are most commonly used in ecommerce websites like Amazon, Flipkart, etc, and streaming platforms like Netflix to recommend the items that are to be purchased by users. Although recommendation engines are implemented in multiple web and mobile applications, these are not in the implementation stage in offline retail stores due to many implications associated with them like infrastructure, cost, etc. In this project, we have used market basket analysis and recommendation systems to propose a model to implement in retail stores to increase sales revenues and enhance customer experience. © 2022 IEEE.

Augmented Reality for medical practice: A comparative study of Deep learning models for Ct-scan segmentation

The coronavirus disease has hardly affected medical healthcare systems worldwide. Physicians use radiological examinations as a primary clinical tool for diagnosing patients with suspected COVID-19 infection. Recently, deep learning approaches have further enhanced medical image processing and analysis, reduced the workload of radiologists, and improved the performance of radiology systems. This paper addresses medical image segmentation;we present a comparative performance study of four neural networks 'NN' models, U-Net, 3D-Unet, KiU-Net and SegNet, for aid diagnosis. Additionally, we present his 3D reconstruction of COVID-19 lesions and lungs and his AR platform with augmented reality, including AR visualization and interaction. Quantitative and qualitative assessments are provided for both contributions. The NN model performed well in the AI-COVID-19 diagnostic process. The AR-COVID-19 platform can be viewed as an ancillary diagnostic tool for medical practice. It serves as a tool to support radiologist visualization and reading. © 2022 IEEE.

COVID-19 detection on chest x-ray image using yolo based architecture

The whole world has been facing the problem of novel Coronavirus (COVID-19) since 2020. Over 88 million cases are confirmed and around 5 lacks deaths are accounted. Using the Lung-Computed Tomography (CT) Lesion Segmentation dataset, deep learning techniques may be used to quickly identify COVID-19 and the exact region that is infected. Based on CT, it is easy to identify the problem and the infected area, then assisting treatment of COVID-19. In the literature survey, research study has considered many research papers worked done work on identification of COVID-19 using chest/lungs X-ray image, and with that identified what are the deep learning-based models or methodology they have used for detecting COVID-19 result. To overcome their result, Authors have proposed a latest methodology of deep learning with the YOLO variant 7x to get optimum result of COVID -19 detection from lungs X-ray image. To identify COVID-19, Authors have applied proposed methodology on publically avail X-ray image-based dataset of COVID-19, proposed methodology has achieved good performance to detect COVID infection from lungs. © 2023 IEEE.

A Novel Fusion Model of Hand-Crafted Features with Deep Convolutional Neural Networks for Classification of Several Chest Diseases using X-ray Images

With the continuing global pandemic of coronavirus (COVID-19) sickness, it is critical to seek diagnostic approaches that are both effective and rapid to limit the number of people infected with the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2). The results of recent research suggest that radiological images include important information related to COVID-19 and other chest diseases. As a result, the use of deep learning (DL) to assist in the automated diagnosis of chest diseases may prove useful as a diagnostic tool in the future. In this study, we propose a novel fusion model of hand-crafted features with deep convolutional neural networks (DCNNs) for classifying ten different chest diseases such as COVID-19, lung cancer (LC), atelectasis (ATE), consolidation lung (COL), tuberculosis (TB), pneumothorax (PNET), edema (EDE), pneumonia (PNEU), pleural thickening (PLT), and normal using chest X-rays (CXR). The method that has been suggested is split down into three distinct parts. The first step involves utilizing the Info-MGAN network to perform segmentation on the raw CXR data to construct lung images of ten different chest diseases. In the second step, the segmented lung images are fed into a novel pipeline that extracts discriminatory features by using hand-crafted techniques such as SURF and ORB, and then these extracted features are fused to the trained DCNNs. At last, various machine learning (ML) models have been used as the last layer of the DCNN models for the classification of chest diseases. Comparison is made between the performance of various proposed architectures for classification, all of which integrate DCNNs, key point extraction methods, and ML models. We were able to attain a classification accuracy of 98.20% for testing by utilizing the VGG-19 model with a softmax layer in conjunction with the ORB technique. Screening for COVID-19 and other lung ailments can be accomplished using the method that has been proposed. The robustness of the model was further confirmed by statistical analyses of the datasets using McNemar’s and ANOVA tests respectively. Author

Analysis of High-Resolution CT Images of COVID-19 Patients

This research work is carried out to quantify the COVID-19 disease and to explore whether the quantitative can be used to analyze the survivability of the patient during admission. In this method, a novel percentage split distribution (PSD), thresholding-based image segmentation method is proposed to quantify normal and lesion regions by analyzing the benign GGOs. The method segments the lung-CT image based on pixel distribution. The segmented regions are quantified as a fraction of region of interest with total number of pixels. The study is also extended to analyze the left and right lungs separately with some common findings on lesion distribution involved with COVID-19 disease. The performance of PSD method has been compared with two traditional image segmentation-based methods. From the results, it has been observed that the segments created by the PSD method are better than experimental methods and clearly identify the margins of lesion and normal regions. © 2023, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.

MWG-Net: Multi-scale Wavelet Guidance Network for COVID-19 Lung Infection Segmentation from CT Images

Recently, accurate segmentation of COVID-19 infection from computed tomography (CT) scans is critical for the diagnosis and treatment of COVID-19. However, infection segmentation is a challenging task due to various textures, sizes and locations of infections, low contrast, and blurred boundaries. To address these problems, we propose a novel Multi-scale Wavelet Guidance Network (MWG-Net) for COVID-19 lung infection by integrating the multi-scale information of wavelet domain into the encoder and decoder of the convolutional neural network (CNN). In particular, we propose the Wavelet Guidance Module (WGM) and Wavelet &Edge Guidance Module (WEGM). Among them, the WGM guides the encoder to extract infection details through the multi-scale spatial and frequency features in the wavelet domain, while the WEGM guides the decoder to recover infection details through the multi-scale wavelet representations and multi-scale infection edge information. Besides, a Progressive Fusion Module (PFM) is further developed to aggregate and explore multi-scale features of the encoder and decoder. Notably, we establish a COVID-19 segmentation dataset (named COVID-Seg-100) containing 5800+ annotated slices for performance evaluation. Furthermore, we conduct extensive experiments to compare our method with other state-of-the-art approaches on our COVID-19-Seg-100 and two publicly available datasets, i.e., MosMedData and COVID-SemiSeg. The results show that our MWG-Net outperforms state-of-the-art methods on different datasets and can achieve more accurate and promising COVID-19 lung infection segmentation. IEEE

Segmentation Algorithm for COVID-19 Infections using Joint Mix and Context Encoder

Automatic image segmentation is critical for medical image segmentation. For example, automatic segmentation of infection area of COVID-19 before and after diagnosis and treatment can help us automatically analyze the diagnosis and treatment effect. The existing algorithms do not solve the problems of insufficient data and insufficient feature extraction at the same time. In this paper, we propose a new data augmentation algorithm to handle the insufficient data problem, named Joint Mix;we utilize an improved U-Net with context encoder to enhance the feature extraction ability. Experiments in the segmentation of COVID-19 infection region using CT images demonstrate its effectiveness. © 2022 IEEE.

PDRF-Net: a progressive dense residual fusion network for COVID-19 lung CT image segmentation

The lungs of patients with COVID-19 exhibit distinctive lesion features in chest CT images. Fast and accurate segmentation of lesion sites from CT images of patients' lungs is significant for the diagnosis and monitoring of COVID-19 patients. To this end, we propose a progressive dense residual fusion network named PDRF-Net for COVID-19 lung CT segmentation. Dense skip connections are introduced to capture multi-level contextual information and compensate for the feature loss problem in network delivery. The efficient aggregated residual module is designed for the encoding-decoding structure, which combines a visual transformer and the residual block to enable the network to extract richer and minute-detail features from CT images. Furthermore, we introduce a bilateral channel pixel weighted module to progressively fuse the feature maps obtained from multiple branches. The proposed PDRF-Net obtains good segmentation results on two COVID-19 datasets. Its segmentation performance is superior to baseline by 11.6% and 11.1%, and outperforming other comparative mainstream methods. Thus, PDRF-Net serves as an easy-to-train, high-performance deep learning model that can realize effective segmentation of the COVID-19 lung CT images. © 2023, The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature.

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.

Towards Explainable AI on Chest X-Ray Diagnosis Using Image Segmentation and CAM Visualization

Computer vision in medical diagnosis has achieved a high level of success in diagnosing diseases with high accuracy. However, conventional classifiers that produce an image-to-label result provide insufficient information for medical professionals to judge and raise concerns over the trust and reliability of a model with results that cannot be explained. Class activation maps are a method of providing insight into a convolutional neural network's feature maps that lead to its classification but in the case of lung diseases, the region of concern is only the lungs. Therefore, the proposed model combines image segmentation models and classifiers to crop out only the lung region of a chest X-ray's class activation map to provide a visualization that improves the explainability and trust of an AI's diagnosis by focusing on a model's weights within the region of concern. The proposed U-Net model achieves 97.72% accuracy and a dice coefficient of 0.9691 on testing data from the COVID-QU-Ex Dataset which includes both diseased and healthy lungs. © 2023, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.