Performance Analysis of GAN Approaches in the Portable Chest X-Ray Synthetic Image Generation for COVID-19 Screening

COVID-19 mainly affects lung tissues, aspect that makes chest X-ray imaging useful to visualize this damage. In the context of the global pandemic, portable devices are advantageous for the daily practice. Furthermore, Computer-aided Diagnosis systems developed with Deep Learning algorithms can support the clinicians while making decisions. However, data scarcity is an issue that hinders this process. Thus, in this work, we propose the performance analysis of 3 different state-of-the-art Generative Adversarial Networks (GAN) approaches that are used for synthetic image generation to improve the task of automatic COVID-19 screening using chest X-ray images provided by portable devices. Particularly, the results demonstrate a significant improvement in terms of accuracy, that raises 5.28% using the images generated by the best image translation model. © 2022, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.

Prediction of COVID-19 patients in danger of death using radiomic features of portable chest radiographs.

INTRODUCTION: Computer-aided diagnostic systems have been developed for the detection and differential diagnosis of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pneumonia using imaging studies to characterise a patient's current condition. In this radiomic study, we propose a system for predicting COVID-19 patients in danger of death using portable chest X-ray images. METHODS: In this retrospective study, we selected 100 patients, including ten that died and 90 that recovered from the COVID-19-AR database of the Cancer Imaging Archive. Since it can be difficult to analyse portable chest X-ray images of patients with COVID-19 because bone components overlap with the abnormal patterns of this disease, we employed a bone-suppression technique during pre-processing. A total of 620 radiomic features were measured in the left and right lung regions, and four radiomic features were selected using the least absolute shrinkage and selection operator technique. We distinguished death from recovery cases using a linear discriminant analysis (LDA) and a support vector machine (SVM). The leave-one-out method was used to train and test the classifiers, and the area under the receiver-operating characteristic curve (AUC) was used to evaluate discriminative performance. RESULTS: The AUCs for LDA and SVM were 0.756 and 0.959, respectively. The discriminative performance was improved when the bone-suppression technique was employed. When the SVM was used, the sensitivity for predicting disease severity was 90.9% (9/10), and the specificity was 95.6% (86/90). CONCLUSIONS: We believe that the radiomic features of portable chest X-ray images can predict COVID-19 patients in danger of death.

Detection of Covid-19 Pneumonia from chest X-ray images: joint use of ECovNNet and fuzzy distance

In the Covid-19 era, it is important to have an edge detector for X-ray (XR) images affected by uncertainties with low computational load but with high performance. So, here, a new version of a well-known fuzzy edge detector, in which a new image fuzzification procedure has been formulated, is proposed. The performance were qualitatively/ quantitatively compared with those obtained by Canny's edge detector (gold standard for this type of problem). In addition, an evolution of the deep fuzzy-neural model named CovNNet, recently proposed by the authors to discriminate chest XR (CXR) images of patients with Covid-19 pneumonia from images of patients with interstitial pneumonias not related to Covid-19 (No-Covid-19), is presented and referred as to Enhanced-CovNNet (ECovNNet). Here, the generalization ability of it is also improved by introducing a regularization based on dropping out some nodes of the network in a random way. ECovNNet processes input CXR images and the corresponding fuzzy CXR images (processed through the proposed enhanced-fuzzy edge detector) and extracts relevant CXR/fuzzy features, subsequently combined in a single array named CXR and fuzzy features vector. The latter is used as input to an Autoencoder-(AE)-based classifier to perform the binary classification: Covid-19 and No-Covid-19, reporting accuracy rate up to 81%. Finally, the work is completed with some interesting physico-mathematical results. © 2022 IEEE.