COVID-19 Detection Using Segmentation, Region Extraction and Classification Pipeline

TL;DR

This study develops a comprehensive pipeline combining segmentation, lung extraction, and CNN-based classification to improve COVID-19 detection accuracy from CT images, demonstrating high performance on public datasets.

Contribution

It introduces an integrated pipeline with both traditional and UNet-based segmentation methods, plus a CNN classifier, showing improved results over previous approaches.

Findings

High dice scores in segmentation on public dataset

High validation accuracy at slice-level

Improved patient-level classification metrics

Abstract

The main purpose of this study is to develop a pipeline for COVID-19 detection from a big and challenging database of Computed Tomography (CT) images. The proposed pipeline includes a segmentation part, a lung extraction part, and a classifier part. Optional slice removal techniques after UNet-based segmentation of slices were also tried. The methodologies tried in the segmentation part are traditional segmentation methods as well as UNet-based methods. In the classification part, a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) was used to take the final diagnosis decisions. In terms of the results: in the segmentation part, the proposed segmentation methods show high dice scores on a publicly available dataset. In the classification part, the results were compared at slice-level and at patient-level as well. At slice-level, methods were compared and showed high validation accuracy indicating efficiency in predicting 2D slices. At patient level, the proposed methods were also compared in terms of validation accuracy and macro F1 score on the validation set. The dataset used for classification is COV-19CT Database. The method proposed here showed improvement from our precious results on the same dataset. In Conclusion, the improved work in this paper has potential clinical usages for COVID-19 detection and diagnosis via CT images. The code is on github at https://github.com/IDU-CVLab/COV19D_3rd