Evidence map›Paper›PMID 35397134›Full record

ArticleMedical physics2022

Label-free coronavirus disease 2019 lesion segmentation based on synthetic healthy lung image subtraction.

Chengyijue Fang, Yingao Liu, Ying Liu, Mengqiu Liu, Xiaohui Qiu, Yang Li, Jie Wen, Yidong Yang

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Article in Medical physics, 2022. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 3 papers.

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3citing papers in PubMed
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3 citing papers in PubMed.

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5 · Who and what money

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8 authors.

Chengyijue FangDepartment of Engineering and Applied Physics, University of Science and Technology of China, Hefei, China.
Yingao LiuDepartment of Engineering and Applied Physics, University of Science and Technology of China, Hefei, China.
Ying LiuDepartment of Radiology, the First Affiliated Hospital of USTC, Division of Life Sciences and Medicine, University of Science and Technology of China, Hefei, China.
Mengqiu LiuDepartment of Radiology, the First Affiliated Hospital of USTC, Division of Life Sciences and Medicine, University of Science and Technology of China, Hefei, China.
Xiaohui QiuDepartment of Radiology, Bozhou People's Hospital, Bozhou, China.
Yang LiDepartment of Radiology, the First Affiliated Hospital of Bengbu Medical College, Bengbu, China.
Jie WenDepartment of Radiology, the First Affiliated Hospital of USTC, Division of Life Sciences and Medicine, University of Science and Technology of China, Hefei, China.
Yidong YangDepartment of Engineering and Applied Physics, University of Science and Technology of China, Hefei, China.

Funding

Anhui Provincial-level S&T Megaprojects BJ2030480006Collaborative Innovation Program of Hefei Science Center, CAS 2020HSC-CIP010Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities WK2030000037National Natural Science Foundation of China 22077116USTC Research Funds of the Double First-Class Initiative YD9110002011
6 · The paper itself

Abstract

purposeCoronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) has become a global pandemic and is still posing a severe health risk to the public. Accurate and efficient segmentation of pneumonia lesions in computed tomography (CT) scans is vital for treatment decision-making. We proposed a novel unsupervised approach using a cycle consistent generative adversarial network (cycle-GAN) which automates and accelerates the process of lesion delineation.

methodThe workflow includes lung volume segmentation, healthy lung image synthesis, infected and healthy image subtraction, and binary lesion mask generation. The lung volume was first delineated using a pre-trained U-net and worked as the input for the following network. A cycle-GAN was trained to generate synthetic healthy lung CT images from infected lung images. After that, the pneumonia lesions were extracted by subtracting the synthetic healthy lung CT images from the infected lung CT images. A median filter and k-means clustering were then applied to contour the lesions. The auto segmentation approach was validated on three different datasets.

resultsThe average Dice coefficient reached 0.666 ± 0.178 on the three datasets. Especially, the dice reached 0.748 ± 0.121 and 0.730 ± 0.095, respectively, on two public datasets Coronacases and Radiopedia. Meanwhile, the average precision and sensitivity for lesion segmentation on the three datasets were 0.679 ± 0.244 and 0.756 ± 0.162. The performance is comparable to existing supervised segmentation networks and outperforms unsupervised ones.

conclusionThe proposed label-free segmentation method achieved high accuracy and efficiency in automatic COVID-19 lesion delineation. The segmentation result can serve as a baseline for further manual modification and a quality assurance tool for lesion diagnosis. Furthermore, due to its unsupervised nature, the result is not influenced by physicians' experience which otherwise is crucial for supervised methods.

Indexed as

COVID-19PneumoniaHumansImage Processing, Computer-AssistedLungPandemicsTomography, X-Ray ComputedCOVID-19 pneumonialabel-free segmentationlesion segmentationunsupervised approach

Identifiers

PMID35397134
PMCPMC9088629

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