Prediction of COVID-19 Pandemic Spread in Kingdom of Saudi Arabia

A significant increase in the number of coronavirus cases can easily be noticed in most of the countries around the world. Inspite of the consistent preventive initiatives being taken to contain the spread of this virus, the unabated increase in the cases is both alarming and intriguing. The role of mathematical models in predicting and estimating the spread of the virus, and identifying various preventive factors dependencies has been found important and effective in most of the previous pandemics like Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) 2003. In this research work, authors have proposed the Susceptible-Infectected-Removed (SIR) model variation in order to forecast the pattern of coronavirus disease (COVID-19) spread for the upcoming eight weeks in perspective of Saudi Arabia. The study has been performed by using SIR model with a proposed simplification using average progression for further estimation of β and γ values for better curve fittings ratios. The predictive results of this study clearly show that under the current public health interventions, there will be an increase in the COVID-19 cases in Saudi Arabia in the next four weeks. Hence, a set of strong health primitives and precautionary measures are recommended in order to avoid and prevent the further spread of COVID-19 in Saudi Arabia.     

AI aiding in diagnosing,tracking recovery of COVID-19 using deep learning on Chest CT scans

Coronavirus (COVID-19) has spread throughout the world, causing mayhem from January 2020 to this day. Owing to its rapidly spreading existence and high death count, the WHO has classified it as a pandemic. Biomedical engineers, virologists, epidemiologists, and people from other medical fields are working to help contain this epidemic as soon as possible. The virus incubates for five days in the human body and then begins displaying symptoms, in some cases, as late as 27 days. In some instances, CT scan based diagnosis has been found to have better sensitivity than RT-PCR, which is currently the gold standard for COVID-19 diagnosis. Lung conditions relevant to COVID-19 in CT scans are ground-glass opacity (GGO), consolidation, and pleural effusion. In this paper, two segmentation tasks are performed to predict lung spaces (segregated from ribcage and flesh in Chest CT) and COVID-19 anomalies from chest CT scans. A 2D deep learning architecture with U-Net as its backbone is proposed to solve both the segmentation tasks. It is observed that change in hyperparameters such as number of filters in down and up sampling layers, addition of attention gates, addition of spatial pyramid pooling as basic block and maintaining the homogeneity of 32 filters after each down-sampling block resulted in a good performance. The proposed approach is assessed using publically available datasets from GitHub and Kaggle. Model performance is evaluated in terms of F1-Score, Mean intersection over union (Mean IoU). It is noted that the proposed approach results in 97.31% of F1-Score and 84.6% of Mean IoU. The experimental results illustrate that the proposed approach using U-Net architecture as backbone with the changes in hyperparameters shows better results in comparison to existing U-Net architecture and attention U-net architecture. The study also recommends how this methodology can be integrated into the workflow of healthcare systems to help control the spread of COVID-19.

     

FaNet: fast assessment network for the novel coronavirus (COVID-19) pneumonia based on 3D CT imaging and clinical symptoms

The novel coronavirus (COVID-19) pneumonia has become a serious health challenge in countries worldwide. Many radiological findings have shown that X-ray and CT imaging scans are an effective solution to assess disease severity during the early stage of COVID-19. Many artificial intelligence (AI)-assisted diagnosis works have rapidly been proposed to focus on solving this classification problem and determine whether a patient is infected with COVID-19. Most of these works have designed networks and applied a single CT image to perform classification; however, this approach ignores prior information such as the patient’s clinical symptoms. Second, making a more specific diagnosis of clinical severity, such as slight or severe, is worthy of attention and is conducive to determining better follow-up treatments. In this paper, we propose a deep learning (DL) based dual-tasks network, named FaNet, that can perform rapid both diagnosis and severity assessments for COVID-19 based on the combination of 3D CT imaging and clinical symptoms. Generally, 3D CT image sequences provide more spatial information than do single CT images. In addition, the clinical symptoms can be considered as prior information to improve the assessment accuracy; these symptoms are typically quickly and easily accessible to radiologists. Therefore, we designed a network that considers both CT image information and existing clinical symptom information and conducted experiments on 416 patient data, including 207 normal chest CT cases and 209 COVID-19 confirmed ones. The experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the additional symptom prior information as well as the network architecture designing. The proposed FaNet achieved an accuracy of 98.28% on diagnosis assessment and 94.83% on severity assessment for test datasets. In the future, we will collect more covid-CT patient data and seek further improvement.

     

基于预训练-微调策略的COVID-19预测模型

COVID-19的世界性大流行对整个社会产生了严重的影响,通过数学建模对确诊病例数进行预测将有助于为公共卫生决策提供依据。在复杂多变的外部环境下,基于深度学习的传染病预测模型成为研究热点。然而,现有模型对数据量要求较高,在进行监督学习时不能很好地适应低数据量的场景,导致预测精度降低。构建结合预训练-微调策略的COVID-19预测模型P-GRU。通过在源地区数据集上采用预训练策略,使模型提前获得更多的疫情数据,从而学习到COVID-19的隐式演变规律,为模型预测提供更充分的先验知识,同时使用包含最近历史信息的固定长度序列预测后续时间点的确诊病例数,并在预测过程中考虑本地人为限制政策因素对疫情趋势的影响,实现针对目标地区数据集的精准预测。实验结果表明,预训练策略能够有效提高预测性能,相比于卷积神经网络、循环神经网络、长短期记忆网络和门控循环单元模型,P-GRU模型在平均绝对百分比误差和均方根误差评价指标上表现优异,更适合用于预测COVID-19传播趋势。     

超级计算支撑的新冠肺炎CT影像综合分析辅助系统应用

目的 新冠肺炎（COVID-19）已经成为全球大流行疾病,在全球范围数百万人确诊。基于计算机断层扫描（computed tomography,CT）数据的影像学分析是临床诊断的重要手段。为了实现快速高效高精度地检测,提出了一种超级计算支撑的新冠肺炎CT影像综合分析辅助系统构建方法。方法 系统整个处理流程依次包括输入处理模块、预处理模块、影像学分析子系统和人工智能（artifiaial intelligence,AI）分析子系统4部分。其中影像学分析子系统通过分析肺实变、磨玻璃影和铺路石等影像学典型特征检测是否有肺炎和典型新冠肺炎特征,给出肺炎影像分析结论;AI分析子系统通过构建深度学习模型来区分普通病毒肺炎与新冠肺炎,增加肺炎的筛查甄别能力。结果 系统发布以来,持续稳定地为国内外超过三十家医院与一百多家科研机构提供了新冠肺炎辅助诊断服务和科研支撑,为抗击疫情提供重要支撑。结论 本文提出的超级计算支撑的新冠肺炎CT影像综合分析辅助系统构建方法,取得了应用效果,是一种有效实现快速部署服务、对突发疫情提供高效支撑的服务方式。     

Analyzing the Implications of COVID-19 Pandemic through an Intelligent-Computing Technique

The outbreak of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2 virus or COVID-19) disease was declared pandemic by the World Health Organization (WHO) on March 11, 2020. COVID-19 has already affected more than 211 nations. In such a bleak scenario, it becomes imperative to analyze and identify those regions in Saudi Arabia that are at high risk. A preemptive study done in the context of predicting the possible COVID-19 hotspots would facilitate in the implementation of prompt and targeted countermeasures against SARS-CoV-2, thus saving many lives. Working towards this intent, the present study adopts a decision making based methodology of simulation named Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP), a multi criteria decision making approach, for assessing the risk of COVID-19 in different regions of Saudi Arabia. AHP gives the ability to measure the risks numerically. Moreover, numerical assessments are always effective and easy to understand. Hence, this research endeavour employs Fuzzy based computational method of decision making for its empirical analysis. Findings in the proposed paper suggest that Riyadh and Makkah are the most susceptible regions, implying that if sustained and focused preventive measures are not introduced at the right juncture, the two cities could be the worst afflicted with the infection. The results obtained through Fuzzy based computational method of decision making are highly corroborative and would be very useful for categorizing and assessing the current COVID-19 situation in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. More specifically, identifying the cities that are likely to be COVID-19 hotspots would help the country’s health and medical fraternity to reinforce intensive containment strategies to counter the ills of the pandemic in such regions.     

新型冠状病毒肺炎(COVID-19)医学影像AI诊断研究进展

2020年3月,世界卫生组织（World Health Organization,WHO）宣布新型冠状病毒肺炎（corona virus disease 2019,COVID-19）为世界大流行病,疫情的爆发给世界各地医疗系统带来巨大压力。现有的COVID-19诊断标准是核酸检测阳性,然而核酸检测假阴性率高达17%~25.5%,为避免漏诊,需要采用基于影像学的AI诊断方法筛查大量疑似病例,扼制疾病传播。本综述将回顾疫情爆发数月以来,基于医学影像的新冠肺炎AI辅助诊断的研究成果。首先介绍CT（computed tomography）和X光片的优缺点,以及COVID-19的放射学特征,然后对数据准备、图像分割和分类识别等AI诊断的关键步骤分别进行阐述,最后介绍COVID-19的跟踪和预后（预先对疾病后续发展过程及结果的判断和估计）。本文还整理了部分公开的COVID-19相关数据集,并对数据标注不足的问题提供了弱监督学习和迁移学习等解决方案。实验验证,AI系统诊断COVID-19的敏感性达到97.4%,特异性达到92.2%,优于放射科医生的诊断结果。其中表现尤为突出的是基于语义分割网络检测COVID-19感染区域,由此可以定量分析感染率。AI系统可以辅助医生诊断和治疗COVID-19,提高放射科医生阅读X光片和CT的效率。     

Smart COVID-3D-SCNN: A Novel Method to Classify X-ray Images of COVID-19

The outbreak of the novel coronavirus has spread worldwide, and millions of people are being infected. Image or detection classification is one of the first application areas of deep learning, which has a significant contribution to medical image analysis. In classification detection, one or more images (detection) are usually used as input, and diagnostic variables (such as whether there is a disease) are used as output. The novel coronavirus has spread across the world, infecting millions of people. Early-stage detection of critical cases of COVID-19 is essential. X-ray scans are used in clinical studies to diagnose COVID-19 and Pneumonia early. For extracting the discriminative features through these modalities, deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs) are used. A siamese convolutional neural network model (COVID-3D-SCNN) is proposed in this study for the automated detection of COVID-19 by utilizing X-ray scans. To extract the useful features, we used three consecutive models working in parallel in the proposed approach. We acquired 575 COVID-19, 1200 non-COVID, and 1400 pneumonia images, which are publicly available. In our framework, augmentation is used to enlarge the dataset. The findings suggest that the proposed method outperforms the results of comparative studies in terms of accuracy 96.70%, specificity 95.55%, and sensitivity 96.62% over (COVID-19 vs. non-COVID19 vs. Pneumonia).     

改进Faster R-CNN模型的CT图磨玻璃密度影目标检测

目的 针对Faster R-CNN （faster region convolutional neural network）模型在肺部计算机断层扫描（computed tomography，CT）图磨玻璃密度影目标检测中小尺寸目标无法有效检测与模型检测速度慢等问题，对Faster R-CNN模型特征提取网络与区域候选网络（region proposal network，RPN）提出了改进方法。方法 使用特征金字塔网络替换Faster R-CNN的特征提取网络，生成特征金字塔；使用基于位置映射的RPN产生锚框，并计算每个锚框的中心到真实物体中心的远近程度（用参数“中心度”表示），对RPN判定为前景的锚框进一步修正位置作为候选区域（region proposal），并将RPN预测的前景/背景分类置信度与中心度结合作为候选区域的排序依据，候选区域经过非极大抑制筛选出感兴趣区域（region of interest，RoI）。将RoI对应的特征区域送入分类回归网络得到检测结果。结果 实验结果表明，在新冠肺炎患者肺部CT图数据集上，本文改进的模型相比于Faster R-CNN模型，召回率（recall）增加了7%，平均精度均值（mean average precision，mAP）增加了3.9%，传输率（frames per second，FPS）由5帧/s提升至9帧/s。特征金字塔网络的引入明显提升了模型的召回率与mAP指标，基于位置映射的RPN显著提升了模型的检测速度。与其他最新改进的目标检测模型相比，本文改进的模型保持了双阶段目标检测模型的高精度，并拉近了与单阶段目标检测模型在检测速度指标上的距离。结论 本文改进的模型能够有效检测到患者肺部CT图的磨玻璃密度影目标区域，对小尺寸目标同样适用，可以快速有效地为医生提供辅助诊断。     

Detection of COVID-19 from chest X-ray images: Boosting the performance with convolutional neural network and transfer learning

Coronavirus disease (COVID-19) is a pandemic that has caused thousands of casualties and impacts all over the world. Most countries are facing a shortage of COVID-19 test kits in hospitals due to the daily increase in the number of cases. Early detection of COVID-19 can protect people from severe infection. Unfortunately, COVID-19 can be misdiagnosed as pneumonia or other illness and can lead to patient death. Therefore, in order to avoid the spread of COVID-19 among the population, it is necessary to implement an automated early diagnostic system as a rapid alternative diagnostic system. Several researchers have done very well in detecting COVID-19; however, most of them have lower accuracy and overfitting issues that make early screening of COVID-19 difficult. Transfer learning is the most successful technique to solve this problem with higher accuracy. In this paper, we studied the feasibility of applying transfer learning and added our own classifier to automatically classify COVID-19 because transfer learning is very suitable for medical imaging due to the limited availability of data. In this work, we proposed a CNN model based on deep transfer learning technique using six different pre-trained architectures, including VGG16, DenseNet201, MobileNetV2, ResNet50, Xception, and EfficientNetB0. A total of 3886 chest X-rays (1200 cases of COVID-19, 1341 healthy and 1345 cases of viral pneumonia) were used to study the effectiveness of the proposed CNN model. A comparative analysis of the proposed CNN models using three classes of chest X-ray datasets was carried out in order to find the most suitable model. Experimental results show that the proposed CNN model based on VGG16 was able to accurately diagnose COVID-19 patients with 97.84% accuracy, 97.90% precision, 97.89% sensitivity, and 97.89% of F1-score. Evaluation of the test data shows that the proposed model produces the highest accuracy among CNNs and seems to be the most suitable choice for COVID-19 classification. We believe that in this pandemic situation, this model will support healthcare professionals in improving patient screening.     

改进卷积神经网络的COVID-19CT影像分类方法研究

针对2019年12月在中国武汉发现的新型冠状病毒,由于RT-PCR检测具有假阴性率过高且得出结果会花费大量时间等问题,研究证明计算机断层扫描(CT)已经成为了辅助诊断和治疗新型冠状病毒肺炎的重要手段之一.由于目前公开的COVID-19 CT数据集较少,提出利用条件生成对抗网络进行数据增强以获得更多样本的CT数据集,以此...     

Densely connected convolutional networks-based COVID-19 screening model

The extensively utilized tool to detect novel coronavirus (COVID-19) is a real-time polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR). However, RT-PCR kits are costly and consume critical time, around 6 to 9 hours to classify the subjects as COVID-19(+) or COVID-19(-). Due to the less sensitivity of RT-PCR, it suffers from high false-negative results. To overcome these issues, many deep learning models have been implemented in the literature for the early-stage classification of suspected subjects. To handle the sensitivity issue associated with RT-PCR, chest CT scans are utilized to classify the suspected subjects as COVID-19 (+), tuberculosis, pneumonia, or healthy subjects. The extensive study on chest CT scans of COVID-19 (+) subjects reveals that there are some bilateral changes and unique patterns. But the manual analysis from chest CT scans is a tedious task. Therefore, an automated COVID-19 screening model is implemented by ensembling the deep transfer learning models such as Densely connected convolutional networks (DCCNs), ResNet152V2, and VGG16. Experimental results reveal that the proposed ensemble model outperforms the competitive models in terms of accuracy, f-measure, area under curve, sensitivity, and specificity.

     

COVID-19肺部CT图像多尺度编解码分割

目的 新型冠状病毒肺炎（corona virus disease 2019,COVID-19）患者肺部计算机断层扫描（computed tomography,CT）图像具有明显的病变特征,快速而准确地从患者肺部CT图像中分割出病灶部位,对COVID-19患者快速诊断和监护具有重要意义。COVID-19肺炎病灶区域复杂多变,现有方法分割精度不高,且对假阴性的关注不够,导致分割结果往往具有较高的特异度,但灵敏度却很低。方法 本文提出了一个基于深度学习的多尺度编解码网络（MED-Net （multiscale encode decode network））,该网络采用资源利用率高、计算速度快的HarDNet68（harmonic densely connected network）作为主干,它主要由5个harmonic dense block （HDB）组成,首先通过5个空洞空间卷积池化金字塔（atrous spatial pyramid pooling,ASPP）对HarDNet68的第1个卷积层和第1、3、4、5个HDB提取多尺度特征。接着在并行解码器（paralleled partial decoder,PPD）基础上设计了一个多尺度的并行解码器（multiscale parallel partial decoder,MPPD）,通过对3个不同感受野的分支进行解码,解决了编码器部分的信息丢失及小病灶分割困难等问题。为了提升CT图像分割精度,降低网络学习难度,网络加入了深度监督机制,配合多尺度解码器,增加了对假阴性的关注,从而提高模型的灵敏度。结果 在COVID-19 CT segmentation数据集上对本文网络进行了测试。实验结果表明,MED-Net可以有效地应对数据集样本少,以及分割目标的纹理、尺寸和位置变异大等问题。在只有50幅训练图像和50幅测试图像的数据集上,分割结果的Dice系数为73.8%,灵敏度为77.7%,特异度为94.3%;与Inf-Net （lung infection segmentation deep network）网络相比,分别提升了8.21%、12.28%、7.76%。其中,Dice系数和灵敏度达到了目前基于该数据集相同划分方式的先进水平。结论 本文网络提高了COVID-19肺炎CT图像分割精确度,有效解决了数据集的数据量少、小病灶分割难度大等问题,具有全自动分割COVID-19肺炎CT图像的能力。     

Covid-19 Forecasting with Deep Learning-based Half-binomial Distribution Cat Swarm Optimization

About 170 nations have been affected by the COvid VIrus Disease-19 (COVID-19) epidemic. On governing bodies across the globe, a lot of stress is created by COVID-19 as there is a continuous rise in patient count testing positive, and they feel challenging to tackle this situation. Most researchers concentrate on COVID-19 data analysis using the machine learning paradigm in these situations. In the previous works, Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) was used to predict future COVID-19 cases. According to LSTM network data, the outbreak is expected to finish by June 2020. However, there is a chance of an over-fitting problem in LSTM and true positive; it may not produce the required results. The COVID-19 dataset has lower accuracy and a higher error rate in the existing system. The proposed method has been introduced to overcome the above-mentioned issues. For COVID-19 prediction, a Linear Decreasing Inertia Weight-based Cat Swarm Optimization with Half Binomial Distribution based Convolutional Neural Network (LDIWCSO-HBDCNN) approach is presented. In this suggested research study, the COVID-19 predicting dataset is employed as an input, and the min-max normalization approach is employed to normalize it. Optimum features are selected using Linear Decreasing Inertia Weight-based Cat Swarm Optimization (LDIWCSO) algorithm, enhancing the accuracy of classification. The Cat Swarm Optimization (CSO) algorithm’s convergence is enhanced using inertia weight in the LDIWCSO algorithm. It is used to select the essential features using the best fitness function values. For a specified time across India, death and confirmed cases are predicted using the Half Binomial Distribution based Convolutional Neural Network (HBDCNN) technique based on selected features. As demonstrated by empirical observations, the proposed system produces significant performance in terms of f-measure, recall, precision, and accuracy.     

融合频率域特征的双路网络模型诊断新冠肺炎

CT检查在新冠肺炎诊断中起着重要作用,为了能够在有限的CT胸部图像集中获得更多有关新冠肺炎的特征信息、建立更加敏感通用的诊断模型,提出了融合CT图像频域特征的双路网络模型（Dp-Net）,该模型主干部分采用ResNet网络模型,并将卷积神经网络的训练过程分为两个部分,一部分提取CT图像空间域的特征,另一部分通过傅里叶变换提取频率域上的特征,将两者训练的结果按照一定的权重进行融合,融合后再由Layer4模块进行一次特征提取。在公开的COVID-CT数据集上与ResNet、VGG等传统的CNN模型进行了比较,也与Self-Trans和LA-DNN等一些改进的CNN模型进行了比较,并对不同权重的融合方案进行了比较,实验结果表明提出的Dp-Net模型在各种评价指标上取得了更好的结果。     

融合多尺度残差和注意力机制的特发性肺纤维化进展预测

目的 特发性肺纤维化（idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis,IPF）是一种致死率极高的肺间质疾病,呈渐进式发展且诊断手段有限,给病情的预后带来极大的困难。目前已有的肺功能衰退严重程度预测方法仍存在准确率较低的问题。方法 提出了一种融合多尺度残差和注意力机制的特发性肺纤维化进展预测模型,包括计算机断层扫描（computed tomography,CT）特征提取网络和多模态特征预测网络,以此预测IPF患者不同周数的用力肺活量（forced vital capacity,FVC）。CT特征提取网络以InceptionV1为骨干网络,添加残差模块和改进的CBAM通道注意力模块（improved channel attention of convolutional block attention module,CBAM-ICA）来扩大网络的感受野,关注肺部区域的有效特征,添加与卷积层并行的空洞卷积模块,补充丢失的细节信息,并对改进的多尺度CT特征融合模块进行两次串联堆叠,提升网络获取CT特征的能力,最终获得更加有效的多尺度CT特征信息。多模态预测网络利用CT特征和临床特征进行融合形成的多模态特征对IPF患者不同周数的FVC值进行预测,提高了网络的预测性能。结果 在OSIC （Open Source Imaging Consortium）提供的肺纤维化测试数据集上的实验结果表明,本文提出的特发性肺纤维化进展预测模型得到了-6.810 7的拉普拉斯对数似然得分,较其他方法具有更好的性能。结论 提出的融合多尺度残差和注意力机制的特发性肺纤维化进展预测模型对预测IPF患者不同周数的FVC值具有一定的有效性,可以帮助医生更好地了解IPF患者肺功能衰退的严重程度,对IPF患者的预后具有指导意义。     

Leveraging Multimodal Ensemble Fusion-Based Deep Learning for COVID-19 on Chest Radiographs

Recently, COVID-19 has posed a challenging threat to researchers, scientists, healthcare professionals, and administrations over the globe, from its diagnosis to its treatment. The researchers are making persistent efforts to derive probable solutions for managing the pandemic in their areas. One of the widespread and effective ways to detect COVID-19 is to utilize radiological images comprising X-rays and computed tomography (CT) scans. At the same time, the recent advances in machine learning (ML) and deep learning (DL) models show promising results in medical imaging. Particularly, the convolutional neural network (CNN) model can be applied to identifying abnormalities on chest radiographs. While the epidemic of COVID-19, much research is led on processing the data compared with DL techniques, particularly CNN. This study develops an improved fruit fly optimization with a deep learning-enabled fusion (IFFO-DLEF) model for COVID-19 detection and classification. The major intention of the IFFO-DLEF model is to investigate the presence or absence of COVID-19. To do so, the presented IFFO-DLEF model applies image pre-processing at the initial stage. In addition, the ensemble of three DL models such as DenseNet169, EfficientNet, and ResNet50, are used for feature extraction. Moreover, the IFFO algorithm with a multilayer perceptron (MLP) classification model is utilized to identify and classify COVID-19. The parameter optimization of the MLP approach utilizing the IFFO technique helps in accomplishing enhanced classification performance. The experimental result analysis of the IFFO-DLEF model carried out on the CXR image database portrayed the better performance of the presented IFFO-DLEF model over recent approaches.     

新冠肺炎传播动力学建模及预测

为了深入研究新冠肺炎传播趋势和传播风险,根据新冠肺炎的传播特点,考虑政府管控和个人防护等措施,在经典传染病SIR模型的基础上,引入低风险群体,提出一种新冠肺炎传播动力学模型SLIR,并对模型的平衡点、稳定性和分岔等复杂动力学行为进行分析,揭示新冠肺炎传播机理.为了提高该模型的疫情预测精度,以美国新冠肺炎的真实数据为基础,使用最小二乘法对模型参数进行分段估计.最后利用该模型对美国新冠肺炎进行预测和分析,仿真结果表明,相比于传统SIR模型,该模型能较好地对美国疫情发展趋势做出预测,官方公布的实际数据也可进一步验证模型的有效性. SLIR模型可以有效仿真新冠肺炎传播,并为政府选择合适的防控措施提供技术支撑.     

COVID TCL: A Joint Metric Loss Function for Diagnosing COVID-19 Patient in the Early and Incubation Period

Convolution Neural Networks (CNN) can quickly diagnose COVID-19 patients by analyzing computed tomography (CT) images of the lung, thereby effectively preventing the spread of COVID-19. However, the existing CNN-based COVID-19 diagnosis models do consider the problem that the lung images of COVID-19 patients in the early stage and incubation period are extremely similar to those of the non-COVID-19 population. Which reduces the model’s classification sensitivity, resulting in a higher probability of the model misdiagnosing COVID-19 patients as non-COVID-19 people. To solve the problem, this paper first attempts to apply triplet loss and center loss to the field of COVID-19 image classification, combining softmax loss to design a jointly supervised metric loss function COVID Triplet-Center Loss (COVID-TCL). Triplet loss can increase inter-class discreteness, and center loss can improve intra-class compactness. Therefore, COVID-TCL can help the CNN-based model to extract more discriminative features and strengthen the diagnostic capacity of COVID-19 patients in the early stage and incubation period. Meanwhile, we use the extreme gradient boosting (XGBoost) as a classifier to design a COVID-19 images classification model of CNN-XGBoost architecture, to further improve the CNN-based model’s classification effect and operation efficiency. The experiment shows that the classification accuracy of the model proposed in this paper is 97.41%, and the sensitivity is 97.61%, which is higher than the other 7 reference models. The COVID-TCL can effectively improve the classification sensitivity of the CNN-based model, the CNN-XGBoost architecture can further improve the CNN-based model’s classification effect.