SAUNet++: an automatic segmentation model of COVID-19 lesion from CT slices

Abstract

The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) epidemic has spread worldwide and the healthcare system is in crisis. Accurate, automated and rapid segmentation of COVID-19 lesion in computed tomography (CT) images can help doctors diagnose and provide prognostic information. However, the variety of lesions and small regions of early lesion complicate their segmentation. To solve these problems, we propose a new SAUNet++ model with squeeze excitation residual (SER) module and atrous spatial pyramid pooling (ASPP) module. The SER module can assign more weights to more important channels and mitigate the problem of gradient disappearance; the ASPP module can obtain context information by atrous convolution using various sampling rates. In addition, the generalized dice loss (GDL) can reduce the correlation between lesion size and dice loss, and is introduced to solve the problem of small regions segmentation of COVID-19 lesion. We collected multinational CT scan data from China, Italy and Russia and conducted extensive comparative and ablation studies. The experimental results demonstrated that our method outperforms state-of-the-art models and can effectively improve the accuracy of COVID-19 lesion segmentation on the dice similarity coefficient (our: 87.38 $$\%$$ vs. U-Net++: 84.25 $$\%$$ ), sensitivity (our: 93.28 $$\%$$ vs. U-Net++: 89.85 $$\%$$ ) and Hausdorff distance (our: 19.99 mm vs. U-Net++: 26.79 mm), respectively.