Aura Hernández-Sabaté

D. Gil, K. Díaz-Chito, C. Sánchez et al.

Future SARS-CoV-2 virus outbreak COVID-XX might possibly occur during the next years. However the pathology in humans is so recent that many clinical aspects, like early detection of complications, side effects after recovery or early screening, are currently unknown. In spite of the number of cases of COVID-19, its rapid spread putting many sanitary systems in the edge of collapse has hindered proper collection and analysis of the data related to COVID-19 clinical aspects. We describe an interdisciplinary initiative that integrates clinical research, with image diagnostics and the use of new technologies such as artificial intelligence and radiomics with the aim of clarifying some of SARS-CoV-2 open questions. The whole initiative addresses 3 main points: 1) collection of standardize data including images, clinical data and analytics; 2) COVID-19 screening for its early diagnosis at primary care centers; 3) define radiomic signatures of COVID-19 evolution and associated pathologies for the early treatment of complications. In particular, in this paper we present a general overview of the project, the experimental design and first results of X-ray COVID-19 detection using a classic approach based on HoG and feature selection. Our experiments include a comparison to some recent methods for COVID-19 screening in X-Ray and an exploratory analysis of the feasibility of X-Ray COVID-19 screening. Results show that classic approaches can outperform deep-learning methods in this experimental setting, indicate the feasibility of early COVID-19 screening and that non-COVID infiltration is the group of patients most similar to COVID-19 in terms of radiological description of X-ray. Therefore, an efficient COVID-19 screening should be complemented with other clinical data to better discriminate these cases.

Santi Puch, Irina Sánchez, Aura Hernández et al.

In this work, we introduce the Global Planar Convolution module as a building-block for fully-convolutional networks that aggregates global information and, therefore, enhances the context perception capabilities of segmentation networks in the context of brain tumor segmentation. We implement two baseline architectures (3D UNet and a residual version of 3D UNet, ResUNet) and present a novel architecture based on these two architectures, ContextNet, that includes the proposed Global Planar Convolution module. We show that the addition of such module eliminates the need of building networks with several representation levels, which tend to be over-parametrized and to showcase slow rates of convergence. Furthermore, we provide a visual demonstration of the behavior of GPC modules via visualization of intermediate representations. We finally participate in the 2018 edition of the BraTS challenge with our best performing models, that are based on ContextNet, and report the evaluation scores on the validation and the test sets of the challenge.