Lightweight Transfer Learning Models for Ultrasound-Guided Classification of COVID-19 Patients

Lightweight deep convolutional neural networks(CNNs)present a good solution to achieve fast and accurate image-guided diagnostic procedures of COVID-19 patients.Recently,advantages of portable Ultrasound(US)imaging such as simplicity and safe procedures have attracted many radiologists for scanning suspected COVID-19 cases.In this paper,a new framework of lightweight deep learning classifiers,namely COVID-LWNet is proposed to identify COVID-19 and pneumonia abnormalities in US images.Compared to traditional deep learning models,lightweight CNNs showed significant performance of real-time vision applications by using mobile devices with limited hardware resources.Four main lightweight deep learning models,namely MobileNets,ShuffleNets,MENet and MnasNet have been proposed to identify the health status of lungs using US images.Public image dataset(POCUS)was used to validate our proposed COVID-LWNet framework successfully.Three classes of infectious COVID-19,bacterial pneumonia,and the healthy lung were investigated in this study.The results showed that the performance of our proposed MnasNet classifier achieved the best accuracy score and shortest training time of 99.0%and 647.0 s,respectively.This paper demonstrates the feasibility of using our proposed COVID-LWNet framework as a new mobilebased radiological tool for clinical diagnosis of COVID-19 and other lung diseases.

Adversarial Neural Network Classifiers for COVID-19 Diagnosis in Ultrasound Images

The novel Coronavirus disease 2019(COVID-19)pandemic has begun in China and is still affecting thousands of patient livesworldwide daily.AlthoughChest X-ray and Computed Tomography are the gold standardmedical imaging modalities for diagnosing potentially infected COVID-19 cases,applying Ultrasound(US)imaging technique to accomplish this crucial diagnosing task has attracted many physicians recently.In this article,we propose two modified deep learning classifiers to identify COVID-19 and pneumonia diseases in US images,based on generative adversarial neural networks(GANs).The proposed image classifiers are a semi-supervised GAN and a modifiedGANwith auxiliary classifier.Each one includes a modified discriminator to identify the class of the US image using semi-supervised learning technique,keeping its main function of defining the“realness”of tested images.Extensive tests have been successfully conducted on public dataset of US images acquired with a convex US probe.This study demonstrated the feasibility of using chest US images with two GAN classifiers as a new radiological tool for clinical check of COVID-19 patients.The results of our proposed GAN models showed that high accuracy values above 91.0%were obtained under different sizes of limited training data,outperforming other deep learning-based methods,such as transfer learning models in the recent studies.Consequently,the clinical implementation of our computer-aided diagnosis of US-COVID-19 is the future work of this study.