CdcSegNet: Automatic COVID-19 Infection Segmentation From CT Images

Abstract

It has been more than two years since the outbreak of COVID-19, which has spread to almost every corner of the world and killed a great number of people. Rapid detection and screening have become an important means of controlling the spread of COVID-19. Segmentation of COVID-19 infected tissue from computed tomography (CT) images of a patient’s lungs can provide clinicians with important information to quantify and diagnose COVID-19. However, the accuracy of medical image segmentation is seriously affected by such factors as the low contrast between the infected tissue and the edge of the surrounding environment, the large variation of the infected tissue and the lack of labeling data. Therefore, a deep learning model called CdcSegNet to accurately segment lung lesions from CT images infected by COVID-19 is proposed. In our method, transfer learning is introduced to solve the problem of lack of annotation data, and three modules, i.e., continuous dilated convolution module (CDC), parallel dual attention module (PDA) and additional multi-core pooling layer (AMP) are innovatively proposed to solve the problem of fuzzy segmentation boundary and to segment effectively infected tissues. Extensive experiments and comparison studies are made, and demonstrate that our model CdcSegNet has high accuracy in COVID-19 segmentation, and is superior to the state-of-the-art models in terms of DICE, SEN, SPE, PPV, and VOE.