COVIR: A virtual rendering of a novel NN architecture O-Net for COVID-19 Ct-scan automatic lung lesions segmentation

Abstract

With the Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) spread, causing a world pandemic, and recently, the virus new variants continue to appear, making the situation more challenging and threatening, the visual assessment and quantification by expert radiologists have become costly and error-prone. Hence, there is a need to propose a model to predict the COVID-19 cases at the earliest possible to control the disease spread. In order to assist the medical professionals and reduce workload and the time the COVID-19 diagnosis cycle takes, this paper proposes a novel neural network architecture termed as O-Net to automatically segment chest Computerised Tomography Ct-scans infected by COVID-19 with optimised computing power and memory occupation. The O-Net consists of two convolutional autoencoders with an upsampling channel and a downsampling channel. Experimental tests show our proposal’s effectiveness and potential, with a dice score of 0.86, pixel accuracy, precision, specificity of 0.99, 0.99, 0.98, respectively. Performance on the external dataset illustrates generalisation and scalability capabilities of the O-Net model to Ct-scan obtained from different scanners with different sizes. The second objective of this work is to introduce our virtual reality platform, COVIR, that visualises and manipulates 3D reconstructed lungs and segmented infected lesions caused by COVID-19. COVIR platform acts as a reading and visualisation support for medical practitioners to diagnose COVID-19 lung infection. The COVIR platform could be used for medical education professional practice and training. It was tested by Thirteen participants (medical staff, researchers, and collaborators), they conclude that the 3D VR visualisation of segmented Ct-Scan provides an aid diagnosis tool for better interpretation.