Hypergraph Learning for Identification of COVID-19 with CT Imaging
This work addresses early screening for COVID-19, a critical public health issue, but appears incremental as it builds on existing hypergraph learning approaches for medical imaging.
The paper tackled the problem of distinguishing COVID-19 from community-acquired pneumonia (CAP) using CT imaging by proposing an Uncertainty Vertex-weighted Hypergraph Learning (UVHL) method, achieving effective and robust identification compared to state-of-the-art methods on a dataset of 2,148 COVID-19 and 1,182 CAP cases.
The coronavirus disease, named COVID-19, has become the largest global public health crisis since it started in early 2020. CT imaging has been used as a complementary tool to assist early screening, especially for the rapid identification of COVID-19 cases from community acquired pneumonia (CAP) cases. The main challenge in early screening is how to model the confusing cases in the COVID-19 and CAP groups, with very similar clinical manifestations and imaging features. To tackle this challenge, we propose an Uncertainty Vertex-weighted Hypergraph Learning (UVHL) method to identify COVID-19 from CAP using CT images. In particular, multiple types of features (including regional features and radiomics features) are first extracted from CT image for each case. Then, the relationship among different cases is formulated by a hypergraph structure, with each case represented as a vertex in the hypergraph. The uncertainty of each vertex is further computed with an uncertainty score measurement and used as a weight in the hypergraph. Finally, a learning process of the vertex-weighted hypergraph is used to predict whether a new testing case belongs to COVID-19 or not. Experiments on a large multi-center pneumonia dataset, consisting of 2,148 COVID-19 cases and 1,182 CAP cases from five hospitals, are conducted to evaluate the performance of the proposed method. Results demonstrate the effectiveness and robustness of our proposed method on the identification of COVID-19 in comparison to state-of-the-art methods.