Computer-Aided Diagnosis of COVID-19 with Joint Instance Segmentation and Classification

Abstract

To address the difficulty of small lesion area detection of COVID-19 patients in their lung CT images, the author has proposed an end-to-end network which using semantic segmentation to guide instance segmentation, and extending transfer learning to the classification of COVID-19 pneumonia, Common pneumonia and Normal. Firstly, in order to extract richer multi-scale features and increase the weight of low-level features, we have introduced the Atrous Spatial Pyramid Pooling(ASPP) into the Feature Pyramid Network(FPN), and proposed Multi-scale Reverse Attention Feature Pyramid Network, then having added a semantic segmentation branch to guide instance segmentation after the output of ASPP, finally, we have extracted the object category score by detector for auxiliary classification. Segmentation experiments were carried out on the dataset of CC-CCII and COVID-19 infection segmentation dataset, the mean average precision(mAP) is 39.57%, 35.36%, Compared with the COVID-CT-Mask-Net, it has improved by 5.52%, 2.33%, we also carried out classification experiments on the dataset that is from COVIDX-CT, the sensitivity and specificity of the model for detecting COVID-19 in test data are 95.88% and 98.95% respectively. Also, the sensitivity and specificity of the model for detecting Common pneumonia in test data are 98.62% and 99.25% respectively, the sensitivity and specificity of the model for detecting Normal in test data are 99.61% and 99.11% respectively, which are the best results based on this dataset and indicators, this shows that the proposed method can quickly and effectively help the clinician identify and diagnose COVID-19 patient through their lung CT images.