Fully automatic deep convolutional approaches for the analysis of COVID-19 using chest X-ray images

Multi-task localization of the hemidiaphragms and lung segmentation in portable chest X-ray images of COVID-19 patients

Background

The COVID-19 can cause long-term symptoms in the patients after they overcome the disease. Given that this disease mainly damages the respiratory system, these symptoms are often related with breathing problems that can be caused by an affected diaphragm. The diaphragmatic function can be assessed with imaging modalities like computerized tomography or chest X-ray. However, this process must be performed by expert clinicians with manual visual inspection. Moreover, during the pandemic, the clinicians were asked to prioritize the use of portable devices, preventing the risk of cross-contamination. Nevertheless, the captures of these devices are of a lower quality.

Objectives

The automatic quantification of the diaphragmatic function can determine the damage of COVID-19 on each patient and assess their evolution during the recovery period, a task that could also be complemented with the lung segmentation.

Methods

We propose a novel multi-task fully automatic methodology to simultaneously localize the position of the hemidiaphragms and to segment the lung boundaries with a convolutional architecture using portable chest X-ray images of COVID-19 patients. For that aim, the hemidiaphragms' landmarks are located adapting the paradigm of heatmap regression.

Results

The methodology is exhaustively validated with four analyses, achieving an 82.31% ± 2.78% of accuracy when localizing the hemidiaphragms' landmarks and a Dice score of 0.9688 ± 0.0012 in lung segmentation.

Conclusions

The results demonstrate that the model is able to perform both tasks simultaneously, being a helpful tool for clinicians despite the lower quality of the portable chest X-ray images.

Comprehensive analysis of clinical data for COVID-19 outcome estimation with machine learning models

COVID-19 is a global threat for the healthcare systems due to the rapid spread of the pathogen that causes it. In such situation, the clinicians must take important decisions, in an environment where medical resources can be insufficient. In this task, the computer-aided diagnosis systems can be very useful not only in the task of supporting the clinical decisions but also to perform relevant analyses, allowing them to understand better the disease and the factors that can identify the high risk patients. For those purposes, in this work, we use several machine learning algorithms to estimate the outcome of COVID-19 patients given their clinical information. Particularly, we perform 2 different studies: the first one estimates whether the patient is at low or at high risk of death whereas the second estimates if the patient needs hospitalization or not. The results of the analyses of this work show the most relevant features for each studied scenario, as well as the classification performance of the considered machine learning models. In particular, the XGBoost algorithm is able to estimate the need for hospitalization of a patient with an AUC-ROC of 0 . 8415 ± 0 . 0217 while it can also estimate the risk of death with an AUC-ROC of 0 . 7992 ± 0 . 0104 . Results have demonstrated the great potential of the proposal to determine those patients that need a greater amount of medical resources for being at a higher risk. This provides the healthcare services with a tool to better manage their resources.

Drug discovery through Covid-19 genome sequencing with siamese graph convolutional neural network

After several waves of COVID-19 led to a massive loss of human life worldwide due to the changes in its variants and the vast explosion. Several researchers proposed neural network-based drug discovery techniques to fight against the pandemic; utilizing neural networks has limitations (Exponential time complexity, Non-Convergence, Mode Collapse, and Diminished Gradient). To overcome those difficulties, this paper proposed a hybrid architecture that will help to repurpose the most appropriate medicines for the treatment of COVID-19. A brief investigation of the sequences has been made to discover the gene density and noncoding proportion through the next gene sequencing. The paper tracks the exceptional locales in the virus DNA sequence as a Drug Target Region (DTR). Then the variable DNA neighborhood search is applied to this DTR to obtain the DNA interaction network to show how the genes are correlated. A drug database has been obtained based on the ontological property of the genomes with advanced D3Similarity so that all the chemical components of the drug database have been identified. Other methods obtained hydroxychloroquine as an effective drug which was rejected by WHO. However, The experimental results show that Remdesivir and Dexamethasone are the most effective drugs, with 97.41 and 97.93%, respectively.

Review on chest pathogies detection systems using deep learning techniques

Chest radiography is the standard and most affordable way to diagnose, analyze, and examine different thoracic and chest diseases. Typically, the radiograph is examined by an expert radiologist or physician to decide about a particular anomaly, if exists. Moreover, computer-aided methods are used to assist radiologists and make the analysis process accurate, fast, and more automated. A tremendous improvement in automatic chest pathologies detection and analysis can be observed with the emergence of deep learning. The survey aims to review, technically evaluate, and synthesize the different computer-aided chest pathologies detection systems. The state-of-the-art of single and multi-pathologies detection systems, which are published in the last five years, are thoroughly discussed. The taxonomy of image acquisition, dataset preprocessing, feature extraction, and deep learning models are presented. The mathematical concepts related to feature extraction model architectures are discussed. Moreover, the different articles are compared based on their contributions, datasets, methods used, and the results achieved. The article ends with the main findings, current trends, challenges, and future recommendations.

An Artificial Intelligence-as-a-Service Architecture for deep learning model embodiment on low-cost devices: A case study of COVID-19 diagnosis

Coronavirus Disease-2019 (COVID-19) causes Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome-Corona Virus-2 (SARS-CoV-2) and has opened several challenges for research concerning diagnosis and treatment. Chest X-rays and computed tomography (CT) scans are effective and fast alternatives to detect and assess the damage that COVID causes to the lungs at different stages of the disease. Although the CT scan is an accurate exam, the chest X-ray is still helpful due to the cheaper, faster, lower radiation exposure, and is available in low-incoming countries. Computer-aided diagnostic systems based on Artificial Intelligence (AI) and computer vision are an alternative to extract features from X-ray images, providing an accurate COVID-19 diagnosis. However, specialized and expensive computational resources come across as challenging. Also, it needs to be better understood how low-cost devices and smartphones can hold AI models to predict diseases timely. Even using deep learning to support image-based medical diagnosis, challenges still need to be addressed once the known techniques use centralized intelligence on high-performance servers, making it difficult to embed these models in low-cost devices. This paper sheds light on these questions by proposing the Artificial Intelligence as a Service Architecture (AIaaS), a hybrid AI support operation, both centralized and distributed, with the purpose of enabling the embedding of already-trained models on low-cost devices or smartphones. We demonstrated the suitability of our architecture through a case study of COVID-19 diagnosis using a low-cost device. Among the main findings of this paper, we point out the performance evaluation of low-cost devices to handle COVID-19 predicting tasks timely and accurately and the quantitative performance evaluation of CNN models embodiment on low-cost devices.

Deep learning attention-guided radiomics for COVID-19 chest radiograph classification

Background

Accurate assessment of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) lung involvement through chest radiograph plays an important role in effective management of the infection. This study aims to develop a two-step feature merging method to integrate image features from deep learning and radiomics to differentiate COVID-19, non-COVID-19 pneumonia and normal chest radiographs (CXR).

Methods

In this study, a deformable convolutional neural network (deformable CNN) was developed and used as a feature extractor to obtain 1,024-dimensional deep learning latent representation (DLR) features. Then 1,069-dimensional radiomics features were extracted from the region of interest (ROI) guided by deformable CNN's attention. The two feature sets were concatenated to generate a merged feature set for classification. For comparative experiments, the same process has been applied to the DLR-only feature set for verifying the effectiveness of feature concatenation.

Results

Using the merged feature set resulted in an overall average accuracy of 91.0% for three-class classification, representing a statistically significant improvement of 0.6% compared to the DLR-only classification. The recall and precision of classification into the COVID-19 class were 0.926 and 0.976, respectively. The feature merging method was shown to significantly improve the classification performance as compared to using only deep learning features, regardless of choice of classifier (P value <0.0001). Three classes' F1-score were 0.892, 0.890, and 0.950 correspondingly (i.e., normal, non-COVID-19 pneumonia, COVID-19).

Conclusions

A two-step COVID-19 classification framework integrating information from both DLR and radiomics features (guided by deep learning attention mechanism) has been developed. The proposed feature merging method has been shown to improve the performance of chest radiograph classification as compared to the case of using only deep learning features.

CXray-EffDet: Chest Disease Detection and Classification from X-ray Images Using the EfficientDet Model

The competence of machine learning approaches to carry out clinical expertise tasks has recently gained a lot of attention, particularly in the field of medical-imaging examination. Among the most frequently used clinical-imaging modalities in the healthcare profession is chest radiography, which calls for prompt reporting of the existence of potential anomalies and illness diagnostics in images. Automated frameworks for the recognition of chest abnormalities employing X-rays are being introduced in health departments. However, the reliable detection and classification of particular illnesses in chest X-ray samples is still a complicated issue because of the complex structure of radiographs, e.g., the large exposure dynamic range. Moreover, the incidence of various image artifacts and extensive inter- and intra-category resemblances further increases the difficulty of chest disease recognition procedures. The aim of this study was to resolve these existing problems. We propose a deep learning (DL) approach to the detection of chest abnormalities with the X-ray modality using the EfficientDet (CXray-EffDet) model. More clearly, we employed the EfficientNet-B0-based EfficientDet-D0 model to compute a reliable set of sample features and accomplish the detection and classification task by categorizing eight categories of chest abnormalities using X-ray images. The effective feature computation power of the CXray-EffDet model enhances the power of chest abnormality recognition due to its high recall rate, and it presents a lightweight and computationally robust approach. A large test of the model employing a standard database from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) was conducted to demonstrate the chest disease localization and categorization performance of the CXray-EffDet model. We attained an AUC score of 0.9080, along with an IOU of 0.834, which clearly determines the competency of the introduced model.

Review on the Evaluation and Development of Artificial Intelligence for COVID-19 Containment

Artificial intelligence has significantly enhanced the research paradigm and spectrum with a substantiated promise of continuous applicability in the real world domain. Artificial intelligence, the driving force of the current technological revolution, has been used in many frontiers, including education, security, gaming, finance, robotics, autonomous systems, entertainment, and most importantly the healthcare sector. With the rise of the COVID-19 pandemic, several prediction and detection methods using artificial intelligence have been employed to understand, forecast, handle, and curtail the ensuing threats. In this study, the most recent related publications, methodologies and medical reports were investigated with the purpose of studying artificial intelligence's role in the pandemic. This study presents a comprehensive review of artificial intelligence with specific attention to machine learning, deep learning, image processing, object detection, image segmentation, and few-shot learning studies that were utilized in several tasks related to COVID-19. In particular, genetic analysis, medical image analysis, clinical data analysis, sound analysis, biomedical data classification, socio-demographic data analysis, anomaly detection, health monitoring, personal protective equipment (PPE) observation, social control, and COVID-19 patients' mortality risk approaches were used in this study to forecast the threatening factors of COVID-19. This study demonstrates that artificial-intelligence-based algorithms integrated into Internet of Things wearable devices were quite effective and efficient in COVID-19 detection and forecasting insights which were actionable through wide usage. The results produced by the study prove that artificial intelligence is a promising arena of research that can be applied for disease prognosis, disease forecasting, drug discovery, and to the development of the healthcare sector on a global scale. We prove that artificial intelligence indeed played a significantly important role in helping to fight against COVID-19, and the insightful knowledge provided here could be extremely beneficial for practitioners and research experts in the healthcare domain to implement the artificial-intelligence-based systems in curbing the next pandemic or healthcare disaster.

Detection of Covid-19 and other pneumonia cases from CT and X-ray chest images using deep learning based on feature reuse residual block and depthwise dilated convolutions neural network

Covid-19 has become a worldwide epidemic which has caused the death of millions in a very short time. This disease, which is transmitted rapidly, has mutated and different variations have emerged. Early diagnosis is important to prevent the spread of this disease. In this study, a new deep learning-based architecture is proposed for rapid detection of Covid-19 and other symptoms using CT and X-ray chest images. This method, called CovidDWNet, is based on a structure based on feature reuse residual block (FRB) and depthwise dilated convolutions (DDC) units. The FRB and DDC units efficiently acquired various features in the chest scan images and it was seen that the proposed architecture significantly improved its performance. In addition, the feature maps obtained with the CovidDWNet architecture were estimated with the Gradient boosting (GB) algorithm. With the CovidDWNet+GB architecture, which is a combination of CovidDWNet and GB, a performance increase of approximately 7% in CT images and between 3% and 4% in X-ray images has been achieved. The CovidDWNet+GB architecture achieved the highest success compared to other architectures, with 99.84% and 100% accuracy rates, respectively, on different datasets containing binary class (Covid-19 and Normal) CT images. Similarly, the proposed architecture showed the highest success with 96.81% accuracy in multi-class (Covid-19, Lung Opacity, Normal and Viral Pneumonia) X-ray images and 96.32% accuracy in the dataset containing X-ray and CT images. When the time to predict the disease in CT or X-ray images is examined, it is possible to say that it has a high speed because the CovidDWNet+GB method predicts thousands of images within seconds.

An IoT-Based Deep Learning Framework for Real-Time Detection of COVID-19 through Chest X-ray Images

Over the next decade, Internet of Things (IoT) and the high-speed 5G network will be crucial in enabling remote access to the healthcare system for easy and fast diagnosis. In this paper, an IoT-based deep learning computer-aided diagnosis (CAD) framework is proposed for online and real-time COVID-19 identification. The proposed work first fine-tuned the five state-of-the-art deep CNN models such as Xception, ResNet50, DenseNet201, MobileNet, and VGG19 and then combined these models into a majority voting deep ensemble CNN (DECNN) model in order to detect COVID-19 accurately. The findings demonstrate that the suggested framework, with a test accuracy of 98%, outperforms other relevant state-of-the-art methodologies in terms of overall performance. The proposed CAD framework has the potential to serve as a decision support system for general clinicians and rural health workers in order to diagnose COVID-19 at an early stage.

McS-Net: Multi-class Siamese network for severity of COVID-19 infection classification from lung CT scan slices

Worldwide COVID-19 is a highly infectious and rapidly spreading disease in almost all age groups. The Computed Tomography (CT) scans of lungs are found to be accurate for the timely diagnosis of COVID-19 infection. In the proposed work, a deep learning-based P-shot N-ways Siamese network along with prototypical nearest neighbor classifiers is implemented for the classification of COVID-19 infection from lung CT scan slices. For this, a Siamese network with an identical sub-network (weight sharing) is used for image classification with a limited dataset for each class. The feature vectors are obtained from the pre-trained sub-networks having weight sharing. The performance of the proposed methodology is evaluated on the benchmark MosMed dataset having categories zero (healthy control) and numerous COVID-19 infections. The proposed methodology is evaluated on (a) chest CT scans provided by medical hospitals in Moscow, Russia for 1110 patients, and (b) case study of low-dose CT scans of 42 patients provided by Avtaran healthcare in India. The deep learning-based Siamese network (15-shot 5-ways) obtained an accuracy of 98.07%, the sensitivity of 95.66%, specificity of 98.83%, and F1-score of 95.10%. The proposed work outperforms the COVID-19 infection severity classification with limited scans availability for numerous infection categories.

Comprehensive Survey of Machine Learning Systems for COVID-19 Detection

The last two years are considered the most crucial and critical period of the COVID-19 pandemic affecting most life aspects worldwide. This virus spreads quickly within a short period, increasing the fatality rate associated with the virus. From a clinical perspective, several diagnosis methods are carried out for early detection to avoid virus propagation. However, the capabilities of these methods are limited and have various associated challenges. Consequently, many studies have been performed for COVID-19 automated detection without involving manual intervention and allowing an accurate and fast decision. As is the case with other diseases and medical issues, Artificial Intelligence (AI) provides the medical community with potential technical solutions that help doctors and radiologists diagnose based on chest images. In this paper, a comprehensive review of the mentioned AI-based detection solution proposals is conducted. More than 200 papers are reviewed and analyzed, and 145 articles have been extensively examined to specify the proposed AI mechanisms with chest medical images. A comprehensive examination of the associated advantages and shortcomings is illustrated and summarized. Several findings are concluded as a result of a deep analysis of all the previous works using machine learning for COVID-19 detection, segmentation, and classification.

AI-CenterNet CXR: An artificial intelligence (AI) enabled system for localization and classification of chest X-ray disease

Machine learning techniques have lately attracted a lot of attention for their potential to execute expert-level clinical tasks, notably in the area of medical image analysis. Chest radiography is one of the most often utilized diagnostic imaging modalities in medical practice, and it necessitates timely coverage regarding the presence of probable abnormalities and disease diagnoses in the images. Computer-aided solutions for the identification of chest illness using chest radiography are being developed in medical imaging research. However, accurate localization and categorization of specific disorders in chest X-ray images is still a challenging problem due to the complex nature of radiographs, presence of different distortions, high inter-class similarities, and intra-class variations in abnormalities. In this work, we have presented an Artificial Intelligence (AI)-enabled fully automated approach using an end-to-end deep learning technique to improve the accuracy of thoracic illness diagnosis. We proposed AI-CenterNet CXR, a customized CenterNet model with an improved feature extraction network for the recognition of multi-label chest diseases. The enhanced backbone computes deep key points that improve the abnormality localization accuracy and, thus, overall disease classification performance. Moreover, the proposed architecture is lightweight and computationally efficient in comparison to the original CenterNet model. We have performed extensive experimentation to validate the effectiveness of the proposed technique using the National Institutes of Health (NIH) Chest X-ray dataset. Our method achieved an overall Area Under the Curve (AUC) of 0.888 and an average IOU of 0.801 to detect and classify the eight types of chest abnormalities. Both the qualitative and quantitative findings reveal that the suggested approach outperforms the existing methods, indicating the efficacy of our approach.

Efficient deep learning approach for augmented detection of Coronavirus disease

The new Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) is rapidly affecting the world population with statistics quickly falling out of date. Due to the limited availability of annotated Coronavirus X-ray and CT images, the detection of COVID-19 remains the biggest challenge in diagnosing this disease. This paper provides a promising solution by proposing a COVID-19 detection system based on deep learning. The proposed deep learning modalities are based on convolutional neural network (CNN) and convolutional long short-term memory (ConvLSTM). Two different datasets are adopted for the simulation of the proposed modalities. The first dataset includes a set of CT images, while the second dataset includes a set of X-ray images. Both of these datasets consist of two categories: COVID-19 and normal. In addition, COVID-19 and pneumonia image categories are classified in order to validate the proposed modalities. The proposed deep learning modalities are tested on both X-ray and CT images as well as a combined dataset that includes both types of images. They achieved an accuracy of 100% and an F1 score of 100% in some cases. The simulation results reveal that the proposed deep learning modalities can be considered and adopted for quick COVID-19 screening.

Data augmentation approaches using cycle-consistent adversarial networks for improving COVID-19 screening in portable chest X-ray images

The current COVID-19 pandemic, that has caused more than 100 million cases as well as more than two million deaths worldwide, demands the development of fast and accurate diagnostic methods despite the lack of available samples. This disease mainly affects the respiratory system of the patients and can lead to pneumonia and to severe cases of acute respiratory syndrome that result in the formation of several pathological structures in the lungs. These pathological structures can be explored taking advantage of chest X-ray imaging. As a recommendation for the health services, portable chest X-ray devices should be used instead of conventional fixed machinery, in order to prevent the spread of the pathogen. However, portable devices present several problems (specially those related with capture quality). Moreover, the subjectivity and the fatigue of the clinicians lead to a very difficult diagnostic process. To overcome that, computer-aided methodologies can be very useful even taking into account the lack of available samples that the COVID-19 affectation shows. In this work, we propose an improvement in the performance of COVID-19 screening, taking advantage of several cycle generative adversarial networks to generate useful and relevant synthetic images to solve the lack of COVID-19 samples, in the context of poor quality and low detail datasets obtained from portable devices. For validating this proposal for improved COVID-19 screening, several experiments were conducted. The results demonstrate that this data augmentation strategy improves the performance of a previous COVID-19 screening proposal, achieving an accuracy of 98.61% when distinguishing among NON-COVID-19 (i.e. normal control samples and samples with pathologies others than COVID-19) and genuine COVID-19 samples. It is remarkable that this methodology can be extrapolated to other pulmonary pathologies and even other medical imaging domains to overcome the data scarcity.

Multi-stage transfer learning for lung segmentation using portable X-ray devices for patients with COVID-19

One of the main challenges in times of sanitary emergency is to quickly develop computer aided diagnosis systems with a limited number of available samples due to the novelty, complexity of the case and the urgency of its implementation. This is the case during the current pandemic of COVID-19. This pathogen primarily infects the respiratory system of the afflicted, resulting in pneumonia and in a severe case of acute respiratory distress syndrome. This results in the formation of different pathological structures in the lungs that can be detected by the use of chest X-rays. Due to the overload of the health services, portable X-ray devices are recommended during the pandemic, preventing the spread of the disease. However, these devices entail different complications (such as capture quality) that, together with the subjectivity of the clinician, make the diagnostic process more difficult and suggest the necessity for computer-aided diagnosis methodologies despite the scarcity of samples available to do so. To solve this problem, we propose a methodology that allows to adapt the knowledge from a well-known domain with a high number of samples to a new domain with a significantly reduced number and greater complexity. We took advantage of a pre-trained segmentation model from brain magnetic resonance imaging of a unrelated pathology and performed two stages of knowledge transfer to obtain a robust system able to segment lung regions from portable X-ray devices despite the scarcity of samples and lesser quality. This way, our methodology obtained a satisfactory accuracy of 0.9761 ± 0.0100 for patients with COVID-19, 0.9801 ± 0.0104 for normal patients and 0.9769 ± 0.0111 for patients with pulmonary diseases with similar characteristics as COVID-19 (such as pneumonia) but not genuine COVID-19.