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A quantum-clustering optimization method for COVID-19 CT scan image segmentation.

ABSTRACT: The World Health Organization (WHO) has declared Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) as one of the highly contagious diseases and considered this epidemic as a global health emergency. Therefore, medical professionals urgently need an early diagnosis method for this new type of disease as soon as possible. In this research work, a new early screening method for the investigation of COVID-19 pneumonia using chest CT scan images has been introduced. For this purpose, a new image segmentation method based on K-means clustering algorithm (KMC) and novel fast forward quantum optimization algorithm (FFQOA) is proposed. The proposed method, called FFQOAK (FFQOA+KMC), initiates by clustering gray level values with the KMC algorithm and generating an optimal segmented image with the FFQOA. The main objective of the proposed FFQOAK is to segment the chest CT scan images so that infected regions can be accurately detected. The proposed method is verified and validated with different chest CT scan images of COVID-19 patients. The segmented images obtained using FFQOAK method are compared with various benchmark image segmentation methods. The proposed method achieves mean squared error, peak signal-to-noise ratio, Jaccard similarity coefficient and correlation coefficient of 712.30, 19.61, 0.90 and 0.91 in case of four experimental sets, namely Experimental_Set_1, Experimental_Set_2, Experimental_Set_3 and Experimental_Set_4, respectively. These four performance evaluation metrics show the effectiveness of FFQOAK method over these existing methods.

SUBMITTER: Singh P

PROVIDER: S-EPMC8316646 | biostudies-literature |

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Project description:Background and objectiveCoronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) is a highly contagious virus spreading all around the world. Deep learning has been adopted as an effective technique to aid COVID-19 detection and segmentation from computed tomography (CT) images. The major challenge lies in the inadequate public COVID-19 datasets. Recently, transfer learning has become a widely used technique that leverages the knowledge gained while solving one problem and applying it to a different but related problem. However, it remains unclear whether various non-COVID19 lung lesions could contribute to segmenting COVID-19 infection areas and how to better conduct this transfer procedure. This paper provides a way to understand the transferability of non-COVID19 lung lesions and a better strategy to train a robust deep learning model for COVID-19 infection segmentation.MethodsBased on a publicly available COVID-19 CT dataset and three public non-COVID19 datasets, we evaluate four transfer learning methods using 3D U-Net as a standard encoder-decoder method. i) We introduce the multi-task learning method to get a multi-lesion pre-trained model for COVID-19 infection. ii) We propose and compare four transfer learning strategies with various performance gains and training time costs. Our proposed Hybrid-encoder Learning strategy introduces a Dedicated-encoder and an Adapted-encoder to extract COVID-19 infection features and general lung lesion features, respectively. An attention-based Selective Fusion unit is designed for dynamic feature selection and aggregation.ResultsExperiments show that trained with limited data, proposed Hybrid-encoder strategy based on multi-lesion pre-trained model achieves a mean DSC, NSD, Sensitivity, F1-score, Accuracy and MCC of 0.704, 0.735, 0.682, 0.707, 0.994 and 0.716, respectively, with better genetalization and lower over-fitting risks for segmenting COVID-19 infection.ConclusionsThe results reveal the benefits of transferring knowledge from non-COVID19 lung lesions, and learning from multiple lung lesion datasets can extract more general features, leading to accurate and robust pre-trained models. We further show the capability of the encoder to learn feature representations of lung lesions, which improves segmentation accuracy and facilitates training convergence. In addition, our proposed Hybrid-encoder learning method incorporates transferred lung lesion features from non-COVID19 datasets effectively and achieves significant improvement. These findings promote new insights into transfer learning for COVID-19 CT image segmentation, which can also be further generalized to other medical tasks.

Project description:BackgroundCoronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) is very contagious. Cases appear faster than the available Polymerase Chain Reaction test kits in many countries. Recently, lung computerized tomography (CT) has been used as an auxiliary COVID-19 testing approach. Automatic analysis of the lung CT images is needed to increase the diagnostic efficiency and release the human participant. Deep learning is successful in automatically solving computer vision problems. Thus, it can be introduced to the automatic and rapid COVID-19 CT diagnosis. Many advanced deep learning-based computer vison techniques were developed to increase the model performance but have not been introduced to medical image analysis.MethodsIn this study, we propose a self-supervised two-stage deep learning model to segment COVID-19 lesions (ground-glass opacity and consolidation) from chest CT images to support rapid COVID-19 diagnosis. The proposed deep learning model integrates several advanced computer vision techniques such as generative adversarial image inpainting, focal loss, and lookahead optimizer. Two real-life datasets were used to evaluate the model's performance compared to the previous related works. To explore the clinical and biological mechanism of the predicted lesion segments, we extract some engineered features from the predicted lung lesions. We evaluate their mediation effects on the relationship of age with COVID-19 severity, as well as the relationship of underlying diseases with COVID-19 severity using statistic mediation analysis.ResultsThe best overall F1 score is observed in the proposed self-supervised two-stage segmentation model (0.63) compared to the two related baseline models (0.55, 0.49). We also identified several CT image phenotypes that mediate the potential causal relationship between underlying diseases with COVID-19 severity as well as the potential causal relationship between age with COVID-19 severity.ConclusionsThis work contributes a promising COVID-19 lung CT image segmentation model and provides predicted lesion segments with potential clinical interpretability. The model could automatically segment the COVID-19 lesions from the raw CT images with higher accuracy than related works. The features of these lesions are associated with COVID-19 severity through mediating the known causal of the COVID-19 severity (age and underlying diseases).

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A quantum-clustering optimization method for COVID-19 CT scan image segmentation.

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