A high-speed unsupervised hardware architecture for rapid diagnosis of COVID-19

ABSTRACT

In the diagnosis of COVID-19, investigation, analysis, and automatic counting of blood cell clusters are the most essential steps. Currently employed methods for cell segmentation, identification, and counting are time-consuming and sometimes performed manually from sampled blood smears, which is hard and needs the support of an expert laboratory technician. The conventional method for the blood-count-test is by automatic hematology analyzer which is quite expensive and slow. Moreover, most of the unsupervised learning techniques currently available presume the medical practitioner to have a prior knowledge regarding the number and action of possible segments within the image before applying recognition. This assumption fails most often as the severity of the disease gets increased like the advanced stages of COVID-19, lung cancer etc. In this manuscript, a simplified automatic histopathological image analysis technique and its hardware architecture suited for blind segmentation, cell counting, and retrieving the cell parameters like radii, area, and perimeter has been identified not only to speed up but also to ease the process of diagnosis as well as prognosis of COVID-19. This is achieved by combining three algorithms the K-means algorithm, a novel statistical analysis technique-HIST (histogram separation technique), and an islanding method an improved version of CCA algorithm/blob detection technique. The proposed method is applied to 15 chronic respiratory disease cases of COVID-19 taken from high profile hospital databases. The output in terms of quantitative parameters like PSNR, SSIM, and qualitative analysis clearly reveals the usefulness of this technique in quick cytological evaluation. The proposed high-speed and low-cost architecture gives promising results in terms of performance of 190 MHz clock frequency, which is two times faster than its software implementation. © 2022 John Wiley & Sons Ltd.