Cross-Site Severity Assessment of COVID-19 From CT Images via Domain Adaptation

IEEE Trans Med Imaging. 2022 Jan;41(1):88-102. doi: 10.1109/TMI.2021.3104474. Epub 2021 Dec 30.

Abstract

Early and accurate severity assessment of Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) based on computed tomography (CT) images offers a great help to the estimation of intensive care unit event and the clinical decision of treatment planning. To augment the labeled data and improve the generalization ability of the classification model, it is necessary to aggregate data from multiple sites. This task faces several challenges including class imbalance between mild and severe infections, domain distribution discrepancy between sites, and presence of heterogeneous features. In this paper, we propose a novel domain adaptation (DA) method with two components to address these problems. The first component is a stochastic class-balanced boosting sampling strategy that overcomes the imbalanced learning problem and improves the classification performance on poorly-predicted classes. The second component is a representation learning that guarantees three properties: 1) domain-transferability by prototype triplet loss, 2) discriminant by conditional maximum mean discrepancy loss, and 3) completeness by multi-view reconstruction loss. Particularly, we propose a domain translator and align the heterogeneous data to the estimated class prototypes (i.e., class centers) in a hyper-sphere manifold. Experiments on cross-site severity assessment of COVID-19 from CT images show that the proposed method can effectively tackle the imbalanced learning problem and outperform recent DA approaches.

MeSH terms

  • COVID-19*
  • Humans
  • SARS-CoV-2
  • Tomography, X-Ray Computed

Grants and funding

This work was supported in part by the National Natural Science Foundation of China under Grant 61976229 and Grant 81871337, in part by the National Key Research and Development Program of China under Grant 2018YFC0116400, in part by Chongqing Science and Health Joint Medical Research Project under Grant 2021MSXM052, in part by the Major Science and Technology Projects of Chongqing City under Grant cstc2018jszx-cyztzxX0017, in part by the Key Emergency Project of Pneumonia Epidemic of Novel Coronavirus Infection under Grant 2020SK3006, in part by the Emergency Project of Prevention and Control for COVID-19 of Central South University under Grant 160260005, in part by the Foundation from Changsha Scientific and Technical Bureau under Grant KQ2001001 and Grant KQ1801115, in part by Hunan Provincial Natural Science Foundation of China under Grant 2021JJ40895, in part by the Science and Technology Innovation Program of Hunan Province under Grant 2020SK53423, and in part by the Clinical Research Center For Medical Imaging in Hunan Province under Grant 2020SK4001.