Co-ERA-Net: Co-Supervision and Enhanced Region Attention for Accurate Segmentation in COVID-19 Chest Infection Images

Accurate segmentation of infected lesions in chest images remains a challenging task due to the lack of utilization of lung region information, which could serve as a strong location hint for infection. In this paper, we propose a novel segmentation network Co-ERA-Net for infections in chest images that leverages lung region information by enhancing supervised information and fusing multi-scale lung region and infection information at different levels. To achieve this, we introduce a Co-supervision scheme incorporating lung region information to guide the network to accurately locate infections within the lung region. Furthermore, we design an Enhanced Region Attention Module (ERAM) to highlight regions with a high probability of infection by incorporating infection information into the lung region information. The effectiveness of the proposed scheme is demonstrated using COVID-19 CT and X-ray datasets, with the results showing that the proposed schemes and modules are promising. Based on the baseline, the Co-supervision scheme, when integrated with lung region information, improves the Dice coefficient by 7.41% and 2.22%, and the IoU by 8.20% and 3.00% in CT and X-ray datasets respectively. Moreover, when this scheme is combined with the Enhanced Region Attention Module, the Dice coefficient sees further improvement of 14.24% and 2.97%, with the IoU increasing by 28.64% and 4.49% for the same datasets. In comparison with existing approaches across various datasets, our proposed method achieves better segmentation performance in all main metrics and exhibits the best generalization and comprehensive performance.