Joint Learning of 3D Lesion Segmentation and Classification for Explainable COVID-19 Diagnosis

IEEE Trans Med Imaging. 2021 Sep;40(9):2463-2476. doi: 10.1109/TMI.2021.3079709. Epub 2021 Aug 31.

Abstract

Given the outbreak of COVID-19 pandemic and the shortage of medical resource, extensive deep learning models have been proposed for automatic COVID-19 diagnosis, based on 3D computed tomography (CT) scans. However, the existing models independently process the 3D lesion segmentation and disease classification, ignoring the inherent correlation between these two tasks. In this paper, we propose a joint deep learning model of 3D lesion segmentation and classification for diagnosing COVID-19, called DeepSC-COVID, as the first attempt in this direction. Specifically, we establish a large-scale CT database containing 1,805 3D CT scans with fine-grained lesion annotations, and reveal 4 findings about lesion difference between COVID-19 and community acquired pneumonia (CAP). Inspired by our findings, DeepSC-COVID is designed with 3 subnets: a cross-task feature subnet for feature extraction, a 3D lesion subnet for lesion segmentation, and a classification subnet for disease diagnosis. Besides, the task-aware loss is proposed for learning the task interaction across the 3D lesion and classification subnets. Different from all existing models for COVID-19 diagnosis, our model is interpretable with fine-grained 3D lesion distribution. Finally, extensive experimental results show that the joint learning framework in our model significantly improves the performance of 3D lesion segmentation and disease classification in both efficiency and efficacy.

MeSH terms

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

Grants and funding

This work was supported in part by the Beijing Natural Science Foundation under Grant JQ20020; in part by the NSFC project under Grant 61922009, Grant 61876013, and Grant 62050175; and in part by the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities under Grant 2020kfyXGYJ097.