Research on the Application of Artificial Intelligence in Public Health Management: Leveraging Artificial Intelligence to Improve COVID-19 CT Image Diagnosis

Tiancheng He; Hong Liu; Zhihao Zhang; Chao Li; Youmei Zhou

doi:10.3390/ijerph20021158

Research on the Application of Artificial Intelligence in Public Health Management: Leveraging Artificial Intelligence to Improve COVID-19 CT Image Diagnosis

Int J Environ Res Public Health. 2023 Jan 9;20(2):1158. doi: 10.3390/ijerph20021158.

Authors

Tiancheng He¹, Hong Liu^{1

2}, Zhihao Zhang³, Chao Li⁴, Youmei Zhou⁵

Affiliations

¹ Department of Political Party and State Governance, East China University of Political Science and Law, Shanghai 201620, China.
² Teacher Work Department of the Party Committee, Shanghai University of Traditional Chinese Medicine, Shanghai 201203, China.
³ College of Computer Science and Technology, Shanghai University of Electric Power, Shanghai 200090, China.
⁴ Department of Computer Science, Zhijiang College of Zhejiang University of Technology, Hangzhou 310024, China.
⁵ Department of Landscape Architecture, College of Architecture and Urban Planning, Tongji University, Shanghai 200092, China.

Abstract

Since the start of 2020, the outbreak of the Coronavirus disease (COVID-19) has been a global public health emergency, and it has caused unprecedented economic and social disaster. In order to improve the diagnosis efficiency of COVID-19 patients, a number of researchers have conducted extensive studies on applying artificial intelligence techniques to the analysis of COVID-19-related medical images. The automatic segmentation of lesions from computed tomography (CT) images using deep learning provides an important basis for the quantification and diagnosis of COVID-19 cases. For a deep learning-based CT diagnostic method, a few of accurate pixel-level labels are essential for the training process of a model. However, the translucent ground-glass area of the lesion usually leads to mislabeling while performing the manual labeling operation, which weakens the accuracy of the model. In this work, we propose a method for correcting rough labels; that is, to hierarchize these rough labels into precise ones by performing an analysis on the pixel distribution of the infected and normal areas in the lung. The proposed method corrects the incorrectly labeled pixels and enables the deep learning model to learn the infected degree of each infected pixel, with which an aiding system (named DLShelper) for COVID-19 CT image diagnosis using the hierarchical labels is also proposed. The DLShelper targets lesion segmentation from CT images, as well as the severity grading. The DLShelper assists medical staff in efficient diagnosis by providing rich auxiliary diagnostic information (including the severity grade, the proportions of the lesion and the visualization of the lesion area). A comprehensive experiment based on a public COVID-19 CT image dataset is also conducted, and the experimental results show that the DLShelper significantly improves the accuracy of segmentation for the lesion areas and also achieves a promising accuracy for the severity grading task.

Keywords: COVID-19; CT image diagnosis; artificial intelligence; automatic segmentation; public health.

Publication types

Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

Artificial Intelligence*
COVID-19 Testing
COVID-19* / diagnostic imaging
Humans
Public Health
SARS-CoV-2
Tomography, X-Ray Computed / methods

Grants and funding

This research was funded by Natural Science Foundation of Zhejiang Province (No. LQ20F020024); Shanghai Education Science Research Project (No. C2022228); Social Science Project of Zhejiang University of Technology (SKY-ZX-20220246); Sub project of National Social Science Foundation of China (20&ZD191).