Detection of COVID-19 Cases with Fuzzy Classifiers Using Chest Computed Tomography

Abstract

The novel coronavirus 2019 (COVID-19) is still spreading rapidly since it first appeared in Wuhan city of China in December 2019, resulting in a worldwide pandemic. Early detection of positive cases plays a key role in preventing the further spread of the epidemic which leads to the development of diagnostic methods that give rapid and accurate responses for the detection of COVID-19. Previous studies confirmed that chest computed tomography (CT) is an indispensable tool for early screening and diagnosing of COVID-19 cases. As a result of examinations on CT scans, a radiological finding that is called ground-glass opacity, causing color, and texture change, was found in the lung of a person with COVID-19. Due to the carelessness of radiologists who work long hours and the misdiagnosis resulting in confusion of the findings with different diseases, an automatic system that helps radiologists is needed. In this paper, we present a new approach based on fuzzy classification for the detection of COVID-19 using 3D CT volumes. In the proposed approach, the skewness, kurtosis, and average statistical features of 3D CT images of patients consisting of two classes, COVID and Normal, are calculated and the value ranges are determined for both classes. Three statistical features and value ranges are used as membership functions in the development of fuzzy logic classifier. The proposed approach provides rapid and accurate diagnostics in terms of COVID vs. Normal (binary classification) under a user-friendly interface. Experimental evaluations demonstrate that our approach has great potential for radiologists to validate their initial screening and improve early diagnosis, isolation, and treatment, which contributes to infection prevention and control of the epidemic.