Abstract

The novel Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic has begun in China and is still affecting thousands of patient lives worldwide daily. Although Chest X-ray and Computed Tomography are the gold standard medical imaging modalities for diagnosing potentially infected COVID-19 cases, applying Ultrasound (US) imaging technique to accomplish this crucial diagnosing task has attracted many physicians recently. In this article, we propose two modified deep learning classifiers to identify COVID-19 and pneumonia diseases in US images, based on generative adversarial neural networks (GANs). The proposed image classifiers are a semi-supervised GAN and a modified GAN with auxiliary classifier. Each one includes a modified discriminator to identify the class of the US image using semi-supervised learning technique, keeping its main function of defining the “realness” of tested images. Extensive tests have been successfully conducted on public dataset of US images acquired with a convex US probe. This study demonstrated the feasibility of using chest US images with two GAN classifiers as a new radiological tool for clinical check of COVID-19 patients. The results of our proposed GAN models showed that high accuracy values above 91.0% were obtained under different sizes of limited training data, outperforming other deep learning-based methods, such as transfer learning models in the recent studies. Consequently, the clinical implementation of our computer-aided diagnosis of US-COVID-19 is the future work of this study.

Highlights

  • Infections of the novel Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) became a worldwide pandemic in 2020 as reported by the World Health Organization (WHO) [1]

  • Running generative adversarial neural networks (GANs) classifiers were done based on a graphical processing unit (GPU) NVIDIA

  • Multi-label classification of lung US images was carried out using our proposed GAN models depicted in Figs. 3 and 4

Read more

Summary

Introduction

Infections of the novel Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) became a worldwide pandemic in 2020 as reported by the World Health Organization (WHO) [1]. 14 million COVID-19 patients have been positively tested and registered in August 2020. More than 8 million have totally recovered, but nearly 600,000 patients have died, most of whom are older than 65 years. Most infected people remain asymptomatic or have slight flu symptoms, the immune system of other patients strongly responds against the coronavirus. The development of suitable vaccine is still in progress, but may require months, even years. The most efficient methods to prevent the expansion of the disease remain early detection of infected people as well as their isolation and the quarantine of any persons in contact with patients [1]

Objectives
Methods
Results
Discussion
Conclusion
Full Text
Published version (Free)

Talk to us

Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have

Schedule a call