Title
Fully automatic pipeline of convolutional neural networks and capsule networks to distinguish COVID-19 from community-acquired pneumonia via CT images
Abstract
Background: Chest computed tomography (CT) is crucial in the diagnosis of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19). However, the persistent pandemic and similar CT manifestations between COVID-19 and community-acquired pneumonia (CAP) raise methodological requirements. Methods: A fully automatic pipeline of deep learning is proposed for distinguishing COVID-19 from CAP using CT images. Inspired by the diagnostic process of radiologists, the pipeline comprises four connected modules for lung segmentation, selection of slices with lesions, slice-level prediction, and patient-level prediction. The roles of the first and second modules and the effectiveness of the capsule network for slice-level prediction were investigated. A dataset of 326 CT scans was collected to train and test the pipeline. Another public dataset of 110 patients was used to evaluate the generalization capability. Results: LinkNet exhibited the largest intersection over union (0.967) and Dice coefficient (0.983) for lung segmentation. For the selection of slices with lesions, the capsule network with the ResNet50 block achieved an accuracy of 92.5% and an area under the curve (AUC) of 0.933. The capsule network using the DenseNet121 block demonstrated better performance for slice-level prediction, with an accuracy of 97.1% and AUC of 0.992. For both datasets, the prediction accuracy of our pipeline was 100% at the patient level. Conclusions: The proposed fully automatic deep learning pipeline of deep learning can distinguish COVID-19 from CAP via CT images rapidly and accurately, thereby accelerating diagnosis and augmenting the performance of radiologists. This pipeline is convenient for use by radiologists and provides explainable predictions.
Year
DOI
Venue
2022
10.1016/j.compbiomed.2021.105182
COMPUTERS IN BIOLOGY AND MEDICINE
Keywords
DocType
Volume
Coronavirus disease 2019, Deep learning, Community-acquired pneumonia, Lung computed tomography image, Capsule network
Journal
141
ISSN
Citations 
PageRank 
0010-4825
0
0.34
References 
Authors
0
10
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Qianqian Qi100.34
Shouliang Qi203.04
Yanan Wu300.34
Chen Li445.18
Bin Tian510.70
Shuyue Xia600.34
Jigang Ren710.70
Liming Yang810.70
Hanlin Wang900.34
Hui Yu1010.70