Special issue on Bio-inspired optimization techniques for Biomedical Data Analysis: Methods and applications

Online Learning of Finite and Infinite Gamma Mixture Models for COVID-19 Detection in Medical Images

The accurate detection of abnormalities in medical images (like X-ray and CT scans) is a challenging problem due to images’ blurred boundary contours, different sizes, variable shapes, and uneven density. In this paper, we tackle this problem via a new effective online variational learning model for both mixtures of finite and infinite Gamma distributions. The proposed approach takes advantage of the Gamma distribution flexibility, the online learning scalability, and the variational inference efficiency. Three different batch and online learning methods based on robust texture-based feature extraction are proposed. Our work is evaluated and validated on several real challenging data sets for different kinds of pneumonia infection detection. The obtained results are very promising given that we approach the classification problem in an unsupervised manner. They also confirm the superiority of the Gamma mixture model compared to the Gaussian mixture model for medical images’ classification.