Social Distance and Face Mask Detection using vision-based sensors and IP cameras

Healthcare systems all over the world are strained as the COVID-19 pandemic's spread becomes more widespread. The only realistic strategy to avoid asymptomatic transmission is to monitor social distance, as there are no viable medical therapies or vaccinations for it. A unique computer vision-based framework that uses deep learning is to analyze the images that are needed to measure social distance. This technique uses the key point regressor to identify the important feature points utilizing the Visual Geometry Group (VGG19) which is a standard Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) architecture having multiple layers, MobileNetV2 which is a computer vision network that advances the-state-of-art for mobile visual identification, including semantic segmentation, classification and object identification. VGG19 and MobileNetV2 were trained on the Kaggle dataset. The border boxes for the item may be seen as well as the crowd is sizeable, and red identified faces are then analyzed by MobileNetV2 to detect whether the person is wearing a mask or not. The distance between the observed people has been calculated using the Euclidian distance. Pretrained models like (You only look once) YOLOV3 which is a real-time object detection system, RCNN, and Resnet50 are used in our embedded vision system environment to identify social distance on images. The framework YOLOV3 performs an overall accuracy of 95% using transfer learning technique runs in 22ms which is four times fast than other predefined models. In the proposed model we achieved an accuracy of 96.67% using VGG19 and 98.38% using MobileNetV2, this beats all other models in its ability to estimate social distance and face mask. © 2023 IEEE.

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.

Framework for biometric iris recognition in video, by deep learning and quality assessment of the iris-pupil region

In the current world scenario the influence of the COVID19 pandemic has reached universal proportions affecting almost all countries. In this sense, the need has arisen to wear gloves or to reduce direct contact with objects (such as sensors for capturing fingerprints or palm prints) as a sanitary measure to protect against the virus. In this new reality, it is necessary to have a biometric identification method that allows safe and rapid recognition of people at borders, or in quarantine controls, or in access to places of high biological risk, among others. In this scenario, iris biometric recognition has reached increasing relevance. This biometric modality avoids all the aforementioned inconveniences with proven high efficiency. However, there are still problems associated with the iris capturing and segmentation in real time that could affect the effectiveness of a System of this nature and that it is necessary to take into account. This work presents a framework for real time iris detection and segmentation in video as part of a biometric recognition system. Our proposal focuses on the stages of image capture, iris detection and segmentation in RGB video frames under controlled conditions (conditions of border and access controls, where people collaborate in the recognition process). The proposed framework is based on the direct detection of the iris-pupil region using the YOLO network, the evaluation of its quality and the semantic segmentation of iris by a Fully Convolutional Network. (FCN). The proposal of an evaluation step of the quality of the iris-pupil region reduce the passage to the system of images with problems of out of focus, blurring, occlusions, light changing and pose of the subject. For the evaluation of image quality, we propose a measure that combines parameters defined in ISO/IEC 19794-6 2005 and others derived from the systematization of the knowledge of the specialized literature. The experiments carried out in four different reference databases and an own video data set demonstrates the feasibility of its application under controlled conditions of border and access controls. The achieved results exceed or equal state-of-the-art methods under these working conditions.

Automated semantic lung segmentation in chest CT images using deep neural network.

Lung segmentation algorithms play a significant role in segmenting theinfected regions in the lungs. This work aims to develop a computationally efficient and robust deep learning model for lung segmentation using chest computed tomography (CT) images with DeepLabV3 + networks for two-class (background and lung field) and four-class (ground-glass opacities, background, consolidation, and lung field). In this work, we investigate the performance of the DeepLabV3 + network with five pretrained networks: Xception, ResNet-18, Inception-ResNet-v2, MobileNet-v2 and ResNet-50. A publicly available database for COVID-19 that contains 750 chest CT images and corresponding pixel-labeled images are used to develop the deep learning model. The segmentation performance has been assessed using five performance measures: Intersection of Union (IoU), Weighted IoU, Balance F1 score, pixel accu-racy, and global accuracy. The experimental results of this work confirm that the DeepLabV3 + network with ResNet-18 and a batch size of 8 have a higher performance for two-class segmentation. DeepLabV3 + network coupled with ResNet-50 and a batch size of 16 yielded better results for four-class segmentation compared to other pretrained networks. Besides, the ResNet with a fewer number of layers is highly adequate for developing a more robust lung segmentation network with lesser computational complexity compared to the conventional DeepLabV3 + network with Xception. This present work proposes a unified DeepLabV3 + network to delineate the two and four different regions automatically using CT images for CoVID-19 patients. Our developed automated segmented model can be further developed to be used as a clinical diagnosis system for CoVID-19 as well as assist clinicians in providing an accurate second opinion CoVID-19 diagnosis.

Computer-Aided Diagnosis of COVID-19 with Joint Instance Segmentation and Classification

To address the difficulty of small lesion area detection of COVID-19 patients in their lung CT images, the author has proposed an end-to-end network which using semantic segmentation to guide instance segmentation, and extending transfer learning to the classification of COVID-19 pneumonia, Common pneumonia and Normal. Firstly, in order to extract richer multi-scale features and increase the weight of low-level features, we have introduced the Atrous Spatial Pyramid Pooling(ASPP) into the Feature Pyramid Network(FPN), and proposed Multi-scale Reverse Attention Feature Pyramid Network, then having added a semantic segmentation branch to guide instance segmentation after the output of ASPP, finally, we have extracted the object category score by detector for auxiliary classification. Segmentation experiments were carried out on the dataset of CC-CCII and COVID-19 infection segmentation dataset, the mean average precision(mAP) is 39.57%, 35.36%, Compared with the COVID-CT-Mask-Net, it has improved by 5.52%, 2.33%, we also carried out classification experiments on the dataset that is from COVIDX-CT, the sensitivity and specificity of the model for detecting COVID-19 in test data are 95.88% and 98.95% respectively. Also, the sensitivity and specificity of the model for detecting Common pneumonia in test data are 98.62% and 99.25% respectively, the sensitivity and specificity of the model for detecting Normal in test data are 99.61% and 99.11% respectively, which are the best results based on this dataset and indicators, this shows that the proposed method can quickly and effectively help the clinician identify and diagnose COVID-19 patient through their lung CT images. © 2022 IEEE.

An Effective Segmentation Method for COVID-19 CT Image Based on Attention Mechanism and Inf-Net

The corona virus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic has recently ravaged the world, seriously affecting the life and health of human society. Computerized tomography (CT) imaging technology is an important diagnostic method for detecting COVID-19. Automatic and accurate segmentation of the lesion is of great significance for diagnosis, treatment and prognosis. Aiming at the segmentation of new coronary pneumonia lesions, an improved automatic segmentation method based on the Inf-Net algorithm is proposed, which introduces the channel attention module to improve feature representation and attention gate model to better fuse edge information. The experimental results on COVID-19 CT Segmentation dataset show that the Dice similarity coefficient, Sensitivity and Specificity of the proposed method are 75.1%, 75.4% and 95.4%. The segmentation performance of it is superior to that of other state-of-the-art ones. (English) [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR] 新型冠状病毒肺炎肆虐全球, 严重影响了人类社会的生活和健康。CT影像技术是检测新冠肺炎的重要诊断方式, 从CT图像中自动准确分割出新冠肺炎病灶区域, 对于诊断、治疗和预后都有重要意义。针对新冠肺炎病灶的自动分割, 文中提出基于Inf-Net算法改进的自动分割方法, 通过引入通道注意力机制加强特征表示, 并运用注意力门模块来更好地融合边缘信息。在COVID-19 CT分割数据集上的实验结果表明, 文中所提出新冠肺炎图像分割方法的Dice系数、灵敏度、特异率分别为75.1%、75.4%和95.4%, 算法性能也优于部分主流方法 (Chinese) [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR] Copyright of Electronic Science & Technology is the property of Electronic Science & Technology Editorial Office and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Identifying Image of the Correct Use of Face Mask Using Semantic Segmentation Technique

In recent years, the world is facing Covid-19 pandemic which has spread to more than 200 countries. WHO recommend everyone to always wearing a mask and keeping a distance to reduce transmission since Covid-19 is very susceptible to infection in a crowded area. In fact, many people misuse masks, such as wearing a mask but not covering the nose, and thus, monitoring the correct use of masks on a large-scale area is not easy. A technology implementing a high precision computer vision is needed to help monitoring the correct use of human mask automatically. This paper proposes a deep learning method that performs semantic segmentation and classification tasks to precisely identify the use of human face mask. Since it is rarely done so far, a sufficient dataset for this task is still lacking. Therefore, we also construct a dataset for face mask semantic segmentation task, including the fine-grained annotated ground truth. Based on our experiments, the proposed method that uses U-Net base model provides the best Mean IoU performance, which is 95%, compared to several comparative models. The segmentation output is then forwarded to a classification process, to decide whether it is a correct or an incorrect use of mask, and provides an accuracy rate that reaches 100%. Details of the experimental results are shown both quantitatively and qualitatively in this paper. The current results of this study may inspire the development of a better system in the future. © 2022 IEEE.

Semantic Segmentation Algorithms for Ground AGV and UAV Medical Transport Scenes

The outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic in recent years and the epidemics of infectious diseases that have occurred around the world over the years, there are problems of lack of medical supplies and difficulties in personnel scheduling. Intelligent medical transportation through modern technology is an effective means to solve this problem. AGV(Automated Guided Vehicle) transportation and UAV(Unmanned Aerial Vehicle) transportation are important ways for intelligent transportation of medical materials. This paper investigates semantic segmentation as a key technology for AGV transport and UAV transport. This paper compares other traditional semantic segmentation networks, and at the same time considers the characteristics of all-weather, all-terrain, and complex transportation of materials in medical transportation, and proposes SSMMTNet(Semantic segmentation of medical material transportation Net). Among them, we propose a Scaling Transformer Block that can extract depth features of point clouds to enrich contextual information. At the same time, the network is validated on the benchmark Semantic3D dataset, obtaining 71.5% mIoU and 90.6% OA. © 2022 IEEE.

COVID-19 Detection Using Deep Learning Based Medical Image Segmentation

COVID-19 is a rapidly spreading illness around the globe, yet healthcare resources are limited. Timely screening of people who may have had COVID-19 is critical in reducing the virus's spread considering the lack of an effective treatment or medication. COVID-19 patients should be diagnosed as well as isolated as early as possible to avoid the infection from spreading and levelling the pandemic arc. To detect COVID-19, chest ultrasound tomography seems to be an option to the RT-PCR assay. The Ultrasound of the lung is a very precise, quick, relatively reliable surgical assay that can be used in conjunction with the RT PCR (Reverse Transcription Polymerase Chain Reaction) assay. Differential diagnosis is difficult due to large differences in structure, shape, and position of illnesses. The efficiency of conventional neural learning-based Computed tomography scans feature extraction is limited by discontinuous ground-glass and acquisitions, as well as clinical alterations. Deep learning-based techniques, primarily Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN), had successfully proved remarkable therapeutic outcomes. Moreover, CNNs are unable to capture complex features amongst images examples, necessitating the use of huge databases. In this paper semantic segmentation method is used. The semantic segmentation architecture U-Net is applied on COVID-19 CT images as well as another method is suggested based on prior semantic segmentation. The accuracy of U-Net is 87% and by using pre-trained U-Net with convolution layers gives accuracy of 89.07%. © 2022, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.

Dense regression activation maps for lesion segmentation in CT scans of COVID-19 patients.

Automatic lesion segmentation on thoracic CT enables rapid quantitative analysis of lung involvement in COVID-19 infections. However, obtaining a large amount of voxel-level annotations for training segmentation networks is prohibitively expensive. Therefore, we propose a weakly-supervised segmentation method based on dense regression activation maps (dRAMs). Most weakly-supervised segmentation approaches exploit class activation maps (CAMs) to localize objects. However, because CAMs were trained for classification, they do not align precisely with the object segmentations. Instead, we produce high-resolution activation maps using dense features from a segmentation network that was trained to estimate a per-lobe lesion percentage. In this way, the network can exploit knowledge regarding the required lesion volume. In addition, we propose an attention neural network module to refine dRAMs, optimized together with the main regression task. We evaluated our algorithm on 90 subjects. Results show our method achieved 70.2% Dice coefficient, substantially outperforming the CAM-based baseline at 48.6%. We published our source code at https://github.com/DIAGNijmegen/bodyct-dram.

Cov-TransNet: Dual branch fusion network with transformer for COVID-19 infection segmentation.

Segmentation of COVID-19 infection is a challenging task due to the blurred boundaries and low contrast between the infected and the non-infected areas in COVID-19 CT images, especially for small infection regions. COV-TransNet is presented to achieve high-precision segmentation of COVID-19 infection regions in this paper. The proposed segmentation network is composed of the auxiliary branch and the backbone branch. The auxiliary branch network adopts transformer to provide global information, helping the convolution layers in backbone branch to learn specific local features better. A multi-scale feature attention module is introduced to capture contextual information and adaptively enhance feature representations. Specially, a high internal resolution is maintained during the attention calculation process. Moreover, feature activation module can effectively reduce the loss of valid information during sampling. The proposed network can take full advantage of different depth and multi-scale features to achieve high sensitivity for identifying lesions of varied sizes and locations. We experiment on several datasets of the COVID-19 lesion segmentation task, including COVID-19-CT-Seg, UESTC-COVID-19, MosMedData and COVID-19-MedSeg. Comprehensive results demonstrate that COV-TransNet outperforms the existing state-of-the-art segmentation methods and achieves better segmentation performance for multi-scale lesions.

Strong semantic segmentation for Covid-19 detection: Evaluating the use of deep learning models as a performant tool in radiography.

INTRODUCTION: With the increasing number of Covid-19 cases as well as care costs, chest diseases have gained increasing interest in several communities, particularly in medical and computer vision. Clinical and analytical exams are widely recognized techniques for diagnosing and handling Covid-19 cases. However, strong detection tools can help avoid damage to chest tissues. The proposed method provides an important way to enhance the semantic segmentation process using combined potential deep learning (DL) modules to increase consistency. Based on Covid-19 CT images, this work hypothesized that a novel model for semantic segmentation might be able to extract definite graphical features of Covid-19 and afford an accurate clinical diagnosis while optimizing the classical test and saving time. METHODS: CT images were collected considering different cases (normal chest CT, pneumonia, typical viral causes, and Covid-19 cases). The study presents an advanced DL method to deal with chest semantic segmentation issues. The approach employs a modified version of the U-net to enable and support Covid-19 detection from the studied images. RESULTS: The validation tests demonstrated competitive results with important performance rates: Precision (90.96% ± 2.5) with an F-score of (91.08% ± 3.2), an accuracy of (93.37% ± 1.2), a sensitivity of (96.88% ± 2.8) and a specificity of (96.91% ± 2.3). In addition, the visual segmentation results are very close to the Ground truth. CONCLUSION: The findings of this study reveal the proof-of-principle for using cooperative components to strengthen the semantic segmentation modules for effective and truthful Covid-19 diagnosis. IMPLICATIONS FOR PRACTICE: This paper has highlighted that DL based approach, with several modules, may be contributing to provide strong support for radiographers and physicians, and that further use of DL is required to design and implement performant automated vision systems to detect chest diseases.

A robust semantic lung segmentation study for CNN-based COVID-19 diagnosis.

This paper aims to diagnose COVID-19 by using Chest X-Ray (CXR) scan images in a deep learning-based system. First of all, COVID-19 Chest X-Ray Dataset is used to segment the lung parts in CXR images semantically. DeepLabV3+ architecture is trained by using the masks of the lung parts in this dataset. The trained architecture is then fed with images in the COVID-19 Radiography Database. In order to improve the output images, some image preprocessing steps are applied. As a result, lung regions are successfully segmented from CXR images. The next step is feature extraction and classification. While features are extracted with modified AlexNet (mAlexNet), Support Vector Machine (SVM) is used for classification. As a result, 3-class data consisting of Normal, Viral Pneumonia and COVID-19 class are classified with 99.8% success. Classification results show that the proposed method is superior to previous state-of-the-art methods.

3D bi-directional transformer U-Net for medical image segmentation.

As one of the popular deep learning methods, deep convolutional neural networks (DCNNs) have been widely adopted in segmentation tasks and have received positive feedback. However, in segmentation tasks, DCNN-based frameworks are known for their incompetence in dealing with global relations within imaging features. Although several techniques have been proposed to enhance the global reasoning of DCNN, these models are either not able to gain satisfying performances compared with traditional fully-convolutional structures or not capable of utilizing the basic advantages of CNN-based networks (namely the ability of local reasoning). In this study, compared with current attempts to combine FCNs and global reasoning methods, we fully extracted the ability of self-attention by designing a novel attention mechanism for 3D computation and proposed a new segmentation framework (named 3DTU) for three-dimensional medical image segmentation tasks. This new framework processes images in an end-to-end manner and executes 3D computation on both the encoder side (which contains a 3D transformer) and the decoder side (which is based on a 3D DCNN). We tested our framework on two independent datasets that consist of 3D MRI and CT images. Experimental results clearly demonstrate that our method outperforms several state-of-the-art segmentation methods in various metrics.

TRANSLATED SKIP CONNECTIONS - EXPANDING THE RECEPTIVE FIELDS OF FULLY CONVOLUTIONAL NEURAL NETWORKS

The effective receptive field of a fully convolutional neural network is an important consideration when designing an architecture, as it defines the portion of the input visible to each convolutional kernel. We propose a neural network module, extending traditional skip connections, called the translated skip connection. Translated skip connections geometrically increase the receptive field of an architecture with negligible impact on both the size of the parameter space and computational complexity. By embedding translated skip connections into a benchmark architecture, we demonstrate that our module matches or outperforms four other approaches to expanding the effective receptive fields of fully convolutional neural networks. We confirm this result across five contemporary image segmentation datasets from disparate domains, including the detection of COVID-19 infection, segmentation of aerial imagery, common object segmentation, and segmentation for self-driving cars. © 2022 IEEE.

A Novel Lightweight Swin-Unet Network for Semantic Segmentation of COVID-19 Lesion in CT Images

The Corona Virus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) is highly infectious, has been spread worldwide, caused a global pandemic, and seriously endangered human health and life. The most effective methods for halting and stopping the transmission of the Corona Virus include early detection, quarantine, and successful treatment. Because it exhibits significant imaging characteristics for COVID-19 lesions in chest computed tomography (CT), it can be used to diagnose COVID-19. Aiming at the inaccuracies of uneven gray distribution, irregular regions, multi-scale, and multi-region segmentation in COVID-19 CT images. This paper proposed a novel Swin-Unet network to improve the accuracy of multi-scale lesion segmentation in COVID-19 CT images. First, in the double-layer Swin Transformer blocks of the Swin-Unet, a residual multi-layer perceptron (ResMLP) module was introduced and replaced the multi-layer perceptron (MLP) module to reduce the loss of features during the transmission process, thereby improving the segmentation precision of multi-scale lesion areas. Second, the uncertain region inpainting module (URIM) was added after Linear Projection, which can refine the uncertain regions in the segmentation features map, thereby improving the segmentation accuracy of different lesion regions. Third, a new loss function DF was designed. It can effectively improve the small target segmentation effect and thus improve the multi-scale segmentation result. Finally, the proposed method was compared to other methods on the public dataset. The Dice, Precision, Recall, and IOU of the proposed method are 0.812, 0.780, 0.848, and 0.683, respectively, which are better than the other models. Moreover, our model has fewer parameters and faster reasoning speed. The proposed method achieves excellent segmentation results for multi-scale and multi-region lesions, and it will be more beneficial in aiding COVID-19 diagnosis and treatment.

Post-pandemic healthcare for COVID-19 vaccine: Tissue-aware diagnosis of cervical lymphadenopathy via multi-modal ultrasound semantic segmentation.

With the widespread deployment of COVID-19 vaccines all around the world, billions of people have benefited from the vaccination and thereby avoiding infection. However, huge amount of clinical cases revealed diverse side effects of COVID-19 vaccines, among which cervical lymphadenopathy is one of the most frequent local reactions. Therefore, rapid detection of cervical lymph node (LN) is essential in terms of vaccine recipients' healthcare and avoidance of misdiagnosis in the post-pandemic era. This paper focuses on a novel deep learning-based framework for the rapid diagnosis of cervical lymphadenopathy towards COVID-19 vaccine recipients. Existing deep learning-based computer-aided diagnosis (CAD) methods for cervical LN enlargement mostly only depend on single modal images, e.g., grayscale ultrasound (US), color Doppler ultrasound, and CT, while failing to effectively integrate information from the multi-source medical images. Meanwhile, both the surrounding tissue objects of the cervical LNs and different regions inside the cervical LNs may imply valuable diagnostic knowledge which is pending for mining. In this paper, we propose an Tissue-Aware Cervical Lymph Node Diagnosis method (TACLND) via multi-modal ultrasound semantic segmentation. The method effectively integrates grayscale and color Doppler US images and realizes a pixel-level localization of different tissue objects, i.e., lymph, muscle, and blood vessels. With inter-tissue and intra-tissue attention mechanisms applied, our proposed method can enhance the implicit tissue-level diagnostic knowledge in both spatial and channel dimension, and realize diagnosis of cervical LN with normal, benign or malignant state. Extensive experiments conducted on our collected cervical LN US dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of our methods on both tissue detection and cervical lymphadenopathy diagnosis. Therefore, our proposed framework can guarantee efficient diagnosis for the vaccine recipients' cervical LN, and assist doctors to discriminate between COVID-related reactive lymphadenopathy and metastatic lymphadenopathy.

Implementation and Comparison of U-net networks for Automatic COVID-19 Lung Infection Segmentation

With the big number of COVID-19 patients, efficient detection tools are necessary. In this work, we proposed an automatic detection and quantification tool based on deep learning model. The architecture used is U-Net architecture, one of the most known for medical applications. This network was introduced as a binary semantic segmentation tool. It uses a dataset of 100 images, seventy-two of them for training, ten for validation, and eighteen for testing. The model will be compared with other deep learning models and evaluated using several evaluation metrics. The results have shown an accuracy of 0.958, sensitivity of 0.900, dice coefficient of 0.726, and a specificity of 0.962. Compared with other related works, our network has the best accuracy and specificity. The obtained results show the ability of the model as a binary segmentation tool to separate infection tissue and healthy tissue. © 2022 IEEE.

Loop Residual Attention Network for Automatic Segmentation of COVID-19 Chest X-ray Images

As COVID-19 continues to put pressure on the global healthcare industry, using artificial intelligence to analyze chest X-rays (CXR) has become an effective way to diagnose the virus and treat patients. Despite that many studies have made significant progress in COVID-19 detection, accurately segmenting infected regions with variable locations and scales from COVID-19 CXR remains challenging. Therefore, this paper proposes a novel framework for COVID-19 CXR image segmentation. Specifically, we design a loop residual module to cyclically extract feature information in the process of encoding and decoding splicing, avoiding the loss of complex semantic information in network computing. At the same time, an absolute position information coding block is proposed to strengthen the position information of feature pixels. Moreover, a hybrid attention module is designed to establish semantic associations between channels and multi-scale spaces. Better feature representation is formed by the fusion of location and scale information to alleviate the impact of variable infection regions on segmentation performance. Extensive experiments are conducted on the public COVID-19 CXR dataset COVID-Qu-Ex, and the results show that our network is leading and robust compared to other networks in COVID-19 segmentation. Author