AI aiding in diagnosing, tracking recovery of COVID-19 using deep learning on Chest CT scans

Kuchana, Maheshwar; Srivastava, Amritesh; Das, Ronald; Mathew, Justin; Mishra, Atul; Khatter, Kiran

Coronavirus (COVID-19) has spread throughout the world, causing mayhem from January 2020 to this day. Owing to its rapidly spreading existence and high death count, the WHO has classified it as a pandemic. Biomedical engineers, virologists, epidemiologists, and people from other medical fields are working to help contain this epidemic as soon as possible. The virus incubates for five days in the human body and then begins displaying symptoms, in some cases, as late as 27 days. In some instances, CT scan based diagnosis has been found to have better sensitivity than RT-PCR, which is currently the gold standard for COVID-19 diagnosis. Lung conditions relevant to COVID-19 in CT scans are ground-glass opacity (GGO), consolidation, and pleural effusion. In this paper, two segmentation tasks are performed to predict lung spaces (segregated from ribcage and flesh in Chest CT) and COVID-19 anomalies from chest CT scans. A 2D deep learning architecture with U-Net as its backbone is proposed to solve both the segmentation tasks. It is observed that change in hyperparameters such as number of filters in down and up sampling layers, addition of attention gates, addition of spatial pyramid pooling as basic block and maintaining the homogeneity of 32 filters after each down-sampling block resulted in a good performance. The proposed approach is assessed using publically available datasets from GitHub and Kaggle. Model performance is evaluated in terms of F1-Score, Mean intersection over union (Mean IoU). It is noted that the proposed approach results in 97.31% of F1-Score and 84.6% of Mean IoU. The experimental results illustrate that the proposed approach using U-Net architecture as backbone with the changes in hyperparameters shows better results in comparison to existing U-Net architecture and attention U-net architecture. The study also recommends how this methodology can be integrated into the workflow of healthcare systems to help control the spread of COVID-19.