GACDN: generative adversarial feature completion and diagnosis network for COVID-19

BACKGROUND: The outbreak of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) causes tens of million infection world-wide. Many machine learning methods have been proposed for the computer-aided diagnosis between COVID-19 and community-acquired pneumonia (CAP) from chest computed tomography (CT) images. Most of these methods utilized the location-specific handcrafted features based on the segmentation results to improve the diagnose performance. However, the prerequisite segmentation step is time-consuming and needs the intervention by lots of expert radiologists, which cannot be achieved in the areas with limited medical resources. METHODS: We propose a generative adversarial feature completion and diagnosis network (GACDN) that simultaneously generates handcrafted features by radiomic counterparts and makes accurate diagnoses based on both original and generated features. Specifically, we first calculate the radiomic features from the CT images. Then, in order to fast obtain the location-specific handcrafted features, we use the proposed GACDN to generate them by its corresponding radiomic features. Finally, we use both radiomic features and location-specific handcrafted features for COVID-19 diagnosis. RESULTS: For the performance of our generated location-specific handcrafted features, the results of four basic classifiers show that it has an average of 3.21% increase in diagnoses accuracy. Besides, the experimental results on COVID-19 dataset show that our proposed method achieved superior performance in COVID-19 vs. community acquired pneumonia (CAP) classification compared with the state-of-the-art methods. CONCLUSIONS: The proposed method significantly improves the diagnoses accuracy of COVID-19 vs. CAP in the condition of incomplete location-specific handcrafted features. Besides, it is also applicable in some regions lacking of expert radiologists and high-performance computing resources.