DECAPS: Detail-Oriented Capsule Networks

A Deep Learning Model Based on Capsule Networks for COVID Diagnostics through X-ray Images

X-ray diagnostics are widely used to detect various diseases, such as bone fracture, pneumonia, or intracranial hemorrhage. This method is simple and accessible in most hospitals, but requires an expert who is sometimes unavailable. Today, some diagnoses are made with the help of deep learning algorithms based on Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN), but these algorithms show limitations. Recently, Capsule Networks (CapsNet) have been proposed to overcome these problems. In our work, CapsNet is used to detect whether a chest X-ray image has disease (COVID or pneumonia) or is healthy. An improved model called DRCaps is proposed, which combines the advantage of CapsNet and the dilation rate (dr) parameter to manage images with 226 × 226 resolution. We performed experiments with 16,669 chest images, in which our model achieved an accuracy of 90%. Furthermore, the model size is 11M with a reconstruction stage, which helps to avoid overfitting. Experiments show how the reconstruction stage works and how we can avoid the max-pooling operation for networks with a stride and dilation rate to downsampling the convolution layers. In this paper, DRCaps is superior to other comparable models in terms of accuracy, parameters, and image size handling. The main idea is to keep the model as simple as possible without using data augmentation or a complex preprocessing stage.

Deep learning-based technique for lesions segmentation in CT scan images for COVID-19 prediction

Since 2019, COVID-19 disease caused significant damage and it has become a serious health issue in the worldwide. The number of infected and confirmed cases is increasing day by day. Different hospitals and countries around the world to this day are not equipped enough to treat these cases and stop this pandemic evolution. Lung and chest X-ray images (e.g., radiography images) and chest CT images are the most effective imaging techniques to analyze and diagnose the COVID-19 related problems. Deep learning-based techniques have recently shown good performance in computer vision and healthcare fields. We propose developing a new deep learning-based application for COVID-19 segmentation and analysis in this work. The proposed system is developed based on the context aggregation neural network. This network consists of three main modules: the context fuse model (CFM), attention mix module (AMM) and a residual convolutional module (RCM). The developed system can detect two main COVID-19-related regions: ground glass opacity and consolidation area in CT images. Generally, these lesions are often related to common pneumonia and COVID 19 cases. Training and testing experiments have been conducted using the COVID-x-CT dataset. Based on the obtained results, the developed system demonstrated better and more competitive results compared to state-of-the-art performances. The numerical findings demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed work by outperforming other works in terms of accuracy by a factor of over 96.23%.

Integrating Digital Twins and Deep Learning for Medical Image Analysis in the era of COVID-19

Digital twins is a virtual representation of a device and process that captures the physical properties of the environment and operational algorithms/techniques in the context of medical devices and technology. It may allow and facilitate healthcare organizations to determine ways to improve medical processes, enhance the patient experience, lower operating expenses, and extend the value of care. Considering the current pandemic situation of COVID-19, various medical devices, e.g., X-rays and CT scan machines and processes, are constantly being used to collect and analyze medical images. In this situation, while collecting and processing an extensive volume of data in the form of images, machines and processes sometimes suffer from system failures that can create critical issues for hospitals and patients. Thus, in this regard, we introduced a digital twin based smart healthcare system integrated with medical devices so that it can be utilized to collect information about the current health condition, configuration, and maintenance history of the device/machine/system. Furthermore, the medical images, i.e., X-rays, are further analyzed by a deep learning model to detect the infection of COVID-19. The designed system is based on Cascade RCNN architecture. In this architecture, detector stages are deeper and are more sequentially selective against close and small false positives. It is a multi stage extension of the Recurrent Convolution Neural Network (RCNN) model and sequentially trained using the output of one stage for the training of the other one. At each stage, the bounding boxes are adjusted in order to locate a suitable value of nearest false positives during training of the different stages. In this way, an arrangement of detectors is adjusted to increase Intersection over Union (IoU) that overcome the problem of overfitting. We trained the model for X-ray images as the model was previously trained on another data set. The developed system achieves good accuracy during the detection phase of the COVID-19. Experimental outcomes reveal the efficiency of the detection architecture, which gains a mean Average Precision (mAP) rate of 0.94.

Effective hybrid deep learning model for COVID-19 patterns identification using CT images

Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) has attracted significant attention of researchers from various disciplines since the end of 2019. Although the global epidemic situation is stabilizing due to vaccination, new COVID-19 cases are constantly being discovered around the world. As a result, lung computed tomography (CT) examination, an aggregated identification technique, has been used to ameliorate diagnosis. It helps reveal missed diagnoses due to the ambiguity of nucleic acid polymerase chain reaction. Therefore, this study investigated how quickly and accurately hybrid deep learning (DL) methods can identify infected individuals with COVID-19 on the basis of their lung CT images. In addition, this study proposed a developed system to create a reliable COVID-19 prediction network using various layers starting with the segmentation of the lung CT scan image and ending with disease prediction. The initial step of the system starts with a proposed technique for lung segmentation that relies on a no-threshold histogram-based image segmentation method. Afterward, the GrabCut method was used as a post-segmentation method to enhance segmentation outcomes and avoid over-and under-segmentation problems. Then, three pre-trained models of standard DL methods, including Visual Geometry Group Network, convolutional deep belief network, and high-resolution network, were utilized to extract the most affective features from the segmented images that can help to identify COVID-19. These three described pre-trained models were combined as a new mechanism to increase the system's overall prediction capabilities. A publicly available dataset, namely, COVID-19 CT, was used to test the performance of the proposed model, which obtained a 95% accuracy rate. On the basis of comparison, the proposed model outperformed several state-of-the-art studies. Because of its effectiveness in accurately screening COVID-19 CT images, the developed model will potentially be valuable as an additional diagnostic tool for leading clinical professionals.

Quantifying prognosis severity of COVID-19 patients from deep learning based analysis of CT chest images

The COVID-19 pandemic has affected all the countries in the world with its droplet spread mode. The colossal amount of cases has strained all the healthcare systems due to the serious nature of infections especially for people with comorbidities. A very high specificity Reverse Transcriptase-Polymerase Chain Reaction (RT-PCR) test is the principal technique in use for diagnosing the COVID-19 patients. Also, CT scans have helped medical professionals in patient severity estimation & progression tracking of COVID-19 virus. In study we present our own extensible COVID-19 viral infection tracking prognosis technique. It uses annotated dataset of CT chest scan slice images created with the help of medical professionals. The annotated dataset contains bounding box coordinates of different features for COVID-19 detection like ground glass opacities, crazy paving pattern, consolidations, lesions etc. We qualitatively identify the severity of the patient for later prognosis stages in our study to assist medical staff for patient prioritization. First we detected COVID-19 positive patients with pre-trained Siamese Neural Network (SNN) which obtained 87.6% accuracy, 87.1% F1-Score & 95.1% AUC scores. These metrics were achieved after removal of 40% quantitatively highly similar images from the COVID-CT dataset. This reduced dataset was further medically annotated with COVID-19 features for bounding box detection. After this we assigned severity scores to detected COVID-19 features and calculated the cumulative severity score for COVID-19 patients. For qualitative patient prioritization with prognosis clinical assistance information, we finally converted this score into a multi-classification problem which obtained 47% weighted-average F1-score.

Deep learning based fusion model for COVID-19 diagnosis and classification using computed tomography images

Recently, the COVID-19 pandemic becomes increased in a drastic way, with the availability of a limited quantity of rapid testing kits. Therefore, automated COVID-19 diagnosis models are essential to identify the existence of disease from radiological images. Earlier studies have focused on the development of Artificial Intelligence (AI) techniques using X-ray images on COVID-19 diagnosis. This paper aims to develop a Deep Learning Based MultiModal Fusion technique called DLMMF for COVID-19 diagnosis and classification from Computed Tomography (CT) images. The proposed DLMMF model operates on three main processes namely Weiner Filtering (WF) based pre-processing, feature extraction and classification. The proposed model incorporates the fusion of deep features using VGG16 and Inception v4 models. Finally, Gaussian Naïve Bayes (GNB) based classifier is applied for identifying and classifying the test CT images into distinct class labels. The experimental validation of the DLMMF model takes place using open-source COVID-CT dataset, which comprises a total of 760 CT images. The experimental outcome defined the superior performance with the maximum sensitivity of 96.53%, specificity of 95.81%, accuracy of 96.81% and F-score of 96.73%.

Diagnosing COVID-19 from CT Image of Lung Segmentation & Classification with Deep Learning Based on Convolutional Neural Networks

Early-stage exposure and analysis of diseases are life-threatening causes for controlling the spread of COVID-19. Recently, Deep Learning (DL) centered approaches have projected intended for COVID-19 during the initial stage through the Computed Tomography (CT) mechanism is to simplify and aid with the analysis. However, these methodologiesundergocommencing one of the following issues: each CT scan slice treated separately and train and evaluate from the same dataset the strategies for image collections. Independent slice therapy is the identical patient involved in the preparation and set the tests at the same time, which can yield inaccurate outcomes. It also poses the issue of whether or not an individual should compare the scans of the same patient. This paper aims to establish image classifiers to determine whether a patient tested positive or negative for COVID-19 centered on lung CT scan imageries. In doing so, a Visual Geometry Group-16 (VGG-16) and a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) 3-layer model used for marking. The images are first segmented using K-means Clustering before the classification to increase classification efficiency. Then, the VGG-16 model and the 3-layer CNN model implemented on the raw and segmented data. The impact of the segmentation of the image and two versions are explored and compared, respectively. Various tuning techniques were performed and tested to improve the VGG-16 model's performance, including increasing epochs, optimizer adjustment, and decreasing the learning rate. Moreover, pre-trained weights of the VGG-16 the model added to enhance the algorithm.

An Encoder-Decoder-Based Method for Segmentation of COVID-19 Lung Infection in CT Images

The novelty of the COVID-19 Disease and the speed of spread, created colossal chaotic, impulse all the worldwide researchers to exploit all resources and capabilities to understand and analyze characteristics of the coronavirus in terms of spread ways and virus incubation time. For that, the existing medical features such as CT-scan and X-ray images are used. For example, CT-scan images can be used for the detection of lung infection. However, the quality of these images and infection characteristics limit the effectiveness of these features. Using artificial intelligence (AI) tools and computer vision algorithms, the accuracy of detection can be more accurate and can help to overcome these issues. In this paper, we propose a multi-task deep-learning-based method for lung infection segmentation on CT-scan images. Our proposed method starts by segmenting the lung regions that may be infected. Then, segmenting the infections in these regions. In addition, to perform a multi-class segmentation the proposed model is trained using the two-stream inputs. The multi-task learning used in this paper allows us to overcome the shortage of labeled data. In addition, the multi-input stream allows the model to learn from many features that can improve the results. To evaluate the proposed method, many metrics have been used including Sorensen-Dice similarity, Sensitivity, Specificity, Precision, and MAE metrics. As a result of experiments, the proposed method can segment lung infections with high performance even with the shortage of data and labeled images. In addition, comparing with the state-of-the-art method our method achieves good performance results. For example, the proposed method reached 78..6% for Dice, 71.1% for Sensitivity metric, 99.3% for Specificity 85.6% for Precision, and 0.062 for Mean Average Error metric, which demonstrates the effectiveness of the proposed method for lung infection segmentation.

Multi-objective Genetic Algorithm Based Deep Learning Model for Automated COVID-19 Detection Using Medical Image Data

Purpose

In early 2020, the world is amid a significant pandemic due to the novel coronavirus disease outbreak, commonly called the COVID-19. Coronavirus is a lung infection disease caused by the Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus 2 virus (SARS-CoV-2). Because of its high transmission rate, it is crucial to detect cases as soon as possible to effectively control the spread of this pandemic and treat patients in the early stages. RT-PCR-based kits are the current standard kits used for COVID-19 diagnosis, but these tests take much time despite their high precision. A faster automated diagnostic tool is required for the effective screening of COVID-19.

Methods

In this study, a new semi-supervised feature learning technique is proposed to screen COVID-19 patients using chest CT scans. The model proposed in this study uses a three-step architecture, consisting of a convolutional autoencoder based unsupervised feature extractor, a multi-objective genetic algorithm (MOGA) based feature selector, and a Bagging Ensemble of support vector machines based binary classifier. The proposed architecture has been designed to provide precise and robust diagnostics for binary classification (COVID vs.nonCOVID). A dataset of 1252 COVID-19 CT scan images, collected from 60 patients, has been used to train and evaluate the model.

Results

The best performing classifier within 127 ms per image achieved an accuracy of 98.79%, the precision of 98.47%, area under curve of 0.998, and an F1 score of 98.85% on 497 test images. The proposed model outperforms the current state of the art COVID-19 diagnostic techniques in terms of speed and accuracy.

Conclusion

The experimental results prove the superiority of the proposed methodology in comparison to existing methods.The study also comprehensively compares various feature selection techniques and highlights the importance of feature selection in medical image data problems.

A Comprehensive Survey of COVID-19 Detection Using Medical Images

The outbreak of the Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) caused the death of a large number of people and declared as a pandemic by the World Health Organization. Millions of people are infected by this virus and are still getting infected every day. As the cost and required time of conventional Reverse Transcription Polymerase Chain Reaction (RT-PCR) tests to detect COVID-19 is uneconomical and excessive, researchers are trying to use medical images such as X-ray and Computed Tomography (CT) images to detect this disease with the help of Artificial Intelligence (AI)-based systems, to assist in automating the scanning procedure. In this paper, we reviewed some of these newly emerging AI-based models that can detect COVID-19 from X-ray or CT of lung images. We collected information about available research resources and inspected a total of 80 papers till June 20, 2020. We explored and analyzed data sets, preprocessing techniques, segmentation methods, feature extraction, classification, and experimental results which can be helpful for finding future research directions in the domain of automatic diagnosis of COVID-19 disease using AI-based frameworks. It is also reflected that there is a scarcity of annotated medical images/data sets of COVID-19 affected people, which requires enhancing, segmentation in preprocessing, and domain adaptation in transfer learning for a model, producing an optimal result in model performance. This survey can be the starting point for a novice/beginner level researcher to work on COVID-19 classification.

Machine learning research towards combating COVID-19: Virus detection, spread prevention, and medical assistance

COVID-19 was first discovered in December 2019 and has continued to rapidly spread across countries worldwide infecting thousands and millions of people. The virus is deadly, and people who are suffering from prior illnesses or are older than the age of 60 are at a higher risk of mortality. Medicine and Healthcare industries have surged towards finding a cure, and different policies have been amended to mitigate the spread of the virus. While Machine Learning (ML) methods have been widely used in other domains, there is now a high demand for ML-aided diagnosis systems for screening, tracking, predicting the spread of COVID-19 and finding a cure against it. In this paper, we present a journey of what role ML has played so far in combating the virus, mainly looking at it from a screening, forecasting, and vaccine perspective. We present a comprehensive survey of the ML algorithms and models that can be used on this expedition and aid with battling the virus.

A bi-stage feature selection approach for COVID-19 prediction using chest CT images

The rapid spread of coronavirus disease has become an example of the worst disruptive disasters of the century around the globe. To fight against the spread of this virus, clinical image analysis of chest CT (computed tomography) images can play an important role for an accurate diagnostic. In the present work, a bi-modular hybrid model is proposed to detect COVID-19 from the chest CT images. In the first module, we have used a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) architecture to extract features from the chest CT images. In the second module, we have used a bi-stage feature selection (FS) approach to find out the most relevant features for the prediction of COVID and non-COVID cases from the chest CT images. At the first stage of FS, we have applied a guided FS methodology by employing two filter methods: Mutual Information (MI) and Relief-F, for the initial screening of the features obtained from the CNN model. In the second stage, Dragonfly algorithm (DA) has been used for the further selection of most relevant features. The final feature set has been used for the classification of the COVID-19 and non-COVID chest CT images using the Support Vector Machine (SVM) classifier. The proposed model has been tested on two open-access datasets: SARS-CoV-2 CT images and COVID-CT datasets and the model shows substantial prediction rates of 98.39% and 90.0% on the said datasets respectively. The proposed model has been compared with a few past works for the prediction of COVID-19 cases. The supporting codes are uploaded in the Github link: https://github.com/Soumyajit-Saha/A-Bi-Stage-Feature-Selection-on-Covid-19-Dataset

DropConnect is effective in modeling uncertainty of Bayesian deep networks

Deep neural networks (DNNs) have achieved state-of-the-art performance in many important domains, including medical diagnosis, security, and autonomous driving. In domains where safety is highly critical, an erroneous decision can result in serious consequences. While a perfect prediction accuracy is not always achievable, recent work on Bayesian deep networks shows that it is possible to know when DNNs are more likely to make mistakes. Knowing what DNNs do not know is desirable to increase the safety of deep learning technology in sensitive applications; Bayesian neural networks attempt to address this challenge. Traditional approaches are computationally intractable and do not scale well to large, complex neural network architectures. In this paper, we develop a theoretical framework to approximate Bayesian inference for DNNs by imposing a Bernoulli distribution on the model weights. This method called Monte Carlo DropConnect (MC-DropConnect) gives us a tool to represent the model uncertainty with little change in the overall model structure or computational cost. We extensively validate the proposed algorithm on multiple network architectures and datasets for classification and semantic segmentation tasks. We also propose new metrics to quantify uncertainty estimates. This enables an objective comparison between MC-DropConnect and prior approaches. Our empirical results demonstrate that the proposed framework yields significant improvement in both prediction accuracy and uncertainty estimation quality compared to the state of the art.