Cargando…

Automatic Identification of Lung Opacities Due to COVID-19 from Chest X-ray Images—Focussing Attention on the Lungs

Due to the primary affection of the respiratory system, COVID-19 leaves traces that are visible in plain chest X-ray images. This is why this imaging technique is typically used in the clinic for an initial evaluation of the patient’s degree of affection. However, individually studying every patient...

Descripción completa

Detalles Bibliográficos
Autores principales: Arias-Londoño, Julián D., Moure-Prado, Álvaro, Godino-Llorente, Juan I.
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: MDPI 2023
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10136982/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/37189482
http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/diagnostics13081381
_version_ 1785032349196484608
author Arias-Londoño, Julián D.
Moure-Prado, Álvaro
Godino-Llorente, Juan I.
author_facet Arias-Londoño, Julián D.
Moure-Prado, Álvaro
Godino-Llorente, Juan I.
author_sort Arias-Londoño, Julián D.
collection PubMed
description Due to the primary affection of the respiratory system, COVID-19 leaves traces that are visible in plain chest X-ray images. This is why this imaging technique is typically used in the clinic for an initial evaluation of the patient’s degree of affection. However, individually studying every patient’s radiograph is time-consuming and requires highly skilled personnel. This is why automatic decision support systems capable of identifying those lesions due to COVID-19 are of practical interest, not only for alleviating the workload in the clinic environment but also for potentially detecting non-evident lung lesions. This article proposes an alternative approach to identify lung lesions associated with COVID-19 from plain chest X-ray images using deep learning techniques. The novelty of the method is based on an alternative pre-processing of the images that focuses attention on a certain region of interest by cropping the original image to the area of the lungs. The process simplifies training by removing irrelevant information, improving model precision, and making the decision more understandable. Using the FISABIO-RSNA COVID-19 Detection open data set, results report that the opacities due to COVID-19 can be detected with a Mean Average Precision with an IoU > 0.5 (mAP@50) of 0.59 following a semi-supervised training procedure and an ensemble of two architectures: RetinaNet and Cascade R-CNN. The results also suggest that cropping to the rectangular area occupied by the lungs improves the detection of existing lesions. A main methodological conclusion is also presented, suggesting the need to resize the available bounding boxes used to delineate the opacities. This process removes inaccuracies during the labelling procedure, leading to more accurate results. This procedure can be easily performed automatically after the cropping stage.
format Online
Article
Text
id pubmed-10136982
institution National Center for Biotechnology Information
language English
publishDate 2023
publisher MDPI
record_format MEDLINE/PubMed
spelling pubmed-101369822023-04-28 Automatic Identification of Lung Opacities Due to COVID-19 from Chest X-ray Images—Focussing Attention on the Lungs Arias-Londoño, Julián D. Moure-Prado, Álvaro Godino-Llorente, Juan I. Diagnostics (Basel) Article Due to the primary affection of the respiratory system, COVID-19 leaves traces that are visible in plain chest X-ray images. This is why this imaging technique is typically used in the clinic for an initial evaluation of the patient’s degree of affection. However, individually studying every patient’s radiograph is time-consuming and requires highly skilled personnel. This is why automatic decision support systems capable of identifying those lesions due to COVID-19 are of practical interest, not only for alleviating the workload in the clinic environment but also for potentially detecting non-evident lung lesions. This article proposes an alternative approach to identify lung lesions associated with COVID-19 from plain chest X-ray images using deep learning techniques. The novelty of the method is based on an alternative pre-processing of the images that focuses attention on a certain region of interest by cropping the original image to the area of the lungs. The process simplifies training by removing irrelevant information, improving model precision, and making the decision more understandable. Using the FISABIO-RSNA COVID-19 Detection open data set, results report that the opacities due to COVID-19 can be detected with a Mean Average Precision with an IoU > 0.5 (mAP@50) of 0.59 following a semi-supervised training procedure and an ensemble of two architectures: RetinaNet and Cascade R-CNN. The results also suggest that cropping to the rectangular area occupied by the lungs improves the detection of existing lesions. A main methodological conclusion is also presented, suggesting the need to resize the available bounding boxes used to delineate the opacities. This process removes inaccuracies during the labelling procedure, leading to more accurate results. This procedure can be easily performed automatically after the cropping stage. MDPI 2023-04-10 /pmc/articles/PMC10136982/ /pubmed/37189482 http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/diagnostics13081381 Text en © 2023 by the authors. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).
spellingShingle Article
Arias-Londoño, Julián D.
Moure-Prado, Álvaro
Godino-Llorente, Juan I.
Automatic Identification of Lung Opacities Due to COVID-19 from Chest X-ray Images—Focussing Attention on the Lungs
title Automatic Identification of Lung Opacities Due to COVID-19 from Chest X-ray Images—Focussing Attention on the Lungs
title_full Automatic Identification of Lung Opacities Due to COVID-19 from Chest X-ray Images—Focussing Attention on the Lungs
title_fullStr Automatic Identification of Lung Opacities Due to COVID-19 from Chest X-ray Images—Focussing Attention on the Lungs
title_full_unstemmed Automatic Identification of Lung Opacities Due to COVID-19 from Chest X-ray Images—Focussing Attention on the Lungs
title_short Automatic Identification of Lung Opacities Due to COVID-19 from Chest X-ray Images—Focussing Attention on the Lungs
title_sort automatic identification of lung opacities due to covid-19 from chest x-ray images—focussing attention on the lungs
topic Article
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10136982/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/37189482
http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/diagnostics13081381
work_keys_str_mv AT ariaslondonojuliand automaticidentificationoflungopacitiesduetocovid19fromchestxrayimagesfocussingattentiononthelungs
AT mourepradoalvaro automaticidentificationoflungopacitiesduetocovid19fromchestxrayimagesfocussingattentiononthelungs
AT godinollorentejuani automaticidentificationoflungopacitiesduetocovid19fromchestxrayimagesfocussingattentiononthelungs