Automated Segmentation of COVID-19 Lesion from Lung CT Images Using U-Net Architecture

Kadry, S.; Al-Turjman, F.; Rajinikanth, V.

Pneumonia caused by the novel Coronavirus Disease (COVID-19) is emerged as a global threat and considerably affected a large population globally irrespective of their age, race, and gender. Due to its rapidity and the infection rate, the World Health Organization (WHO) declared this disease as a pandemic. The proposed research work aims to develop an automated COVID-19 lesion segmentation system using the Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) architecture called the U-Net. The traditional U-Net scheme is employed to examine the COVID-19 infection present in the lung CT images. This scheme is implemented on the benchmark COVID-19 images existing in the literature (300 images) and the segmentation performance of the U-Net is confirmed by computing the essential performance measures using a relative assessment among the extracted lesion and the Ground-Truth (GT). The overall result attained with the proposed study confirms that, the U-Net scheme helps to get the better values for the performance values, such as Jaccard (>86%), Dice (>92%) and segmentation accuracy (>95%). © 2021, ICST Institute for Computer Sciences, Social Informatics and Telecommunications Engineering.