Detection of COVID-19 Lung Lesions in Computed Tomography Images Using Deep Learning

Abstract

The novel coronavirus (COVID-19) is a disease that mainly affects the lung tissue. The detection of lesions caused by this disease can help to provide an adequate treatment and monitoring its evolution. This research focuses on the bi nary classification of lung lesions caused by COVID-19 in images of computed tomography (CT) using deep learning. The database used in the experiments comes from two independent repositories, which contains tomographic scans of patients with a positive diagnosis of COVID-19. The output layers of four pre-trained convolutional networks were adapted to the proposed task and re-trained using the fine-tuning technique. The models were validated with test images from the two database’s repositories. The model VGG19, considering one of the repositories, showed the best performance with 88% and 90.2% of accuracy and recall, respectively. The model combination using the soft voting technique presented the highest accuracy (84.4%), with a recall of 94.4% employing the data from the other repository. The area under the receiver operating characteristic curve was 0.92 at best. The proposed method based on deep learning represents a valuable tool to automatically classify COVID-19 lesions on CT images and could also be used to assess the extent of lung infection.