COVID-19 Detection in Computed Tomography Images with 2D and 3D Approaches
This work addresses the problem of supplementing RT-PCR tests for COVID-19 diagnosis using CT scans, with deployment in a medical setting, but it is incremental as it builds on existing deep learning methods.
The authors tackled COVID-19 detection in CT images by developing IST-CovNet, an ensemble combining 2D and 3D deep learning approaches, achieving 90.80% accuracy and 0.95 AUC on their IST-C dataset and 93.69% accuracy and 0.99 AUC on the MosMed dataset.
Detecting COVID-19 in computed tomography (CT) or radiography images has been proposed as a supplement to the definitive RT-PCR test. We present a deep learning ensemble for detecting COVID-19 infection, combining slice-based (2D) and volume-based (3D) approaches. The 2D system detects the infection on each CT slice independently, combining them to obtain the patient-level decision via different methods (averaging and long-short term memory networks). The 3D system takes the whole CT volume to arrive to the patient-level decision in one step. A new high resolution chest CT scan dataset, called the IST-C dataset, is also collected in this work. The proposed ensemble, called IST-CovNet, obtains 90.80% accuracy and 0.95 AUC score overall on the IST-C dataset in detecting COVID-19 among normal controls and other types of lung pathologies; and 93.69% accuracy and 0.99 AUC score on the publicly available MosMed dataset that consists of COVID-19 scans and normal controls only. The system is deployed at Istanbul University Cerrahpasa School of Medicine.