<abstract xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">

<italic>Introduction:</italic> Quantification of lung involvement in COVID-19 using chest Computed tomography (CT) scan can help physicians to evaluate the progression of the disease or treatment response. This paper presents an automatic deep transfer learning ensemble based on pre-trained convolutional neural networks (CNNs) to determine the severity of COVID -19 as normal, mild, moderate, and severe based on the images of the lungs CT.
<italic>Material and methods:</italic> In this study, two different deep transfer learning strategies were used. In the first procedure, features were extracted from fifteen pre-trained CNNs architectures and then fed into a support vector machine (SVM) classifier. In the second procedure, the pre-trained CNNs were fine-tuned using the chest CT images, and then features were extracted for the purpose of classification by the softmax layer. Finally, an ensemble method was developed based on majority voting of the deep learning outputs to increase the performance of the recognition on each of the two strategies. A dataset of CT scans was collected and then labeled as normal (314), mild (262), moderate (72), and severe (35) for COVID-19 by the consensus of two highly qualified radiologists.
<italic>Results:</italic> The ensemble of five deep transfer learning outputs named EfficientNetB3, EfficientNetB4, InceptionV3, NasNetMobile, and ResNext50 in the second strategy has better results than the first strategy and also the individual deep transfer learning models in diagnosing the severity of COVID-19 with 85% accuracy.
<italic>Conclusions:</italic> Our proposed study is well suited for quantifying lung involvement of COVID-19 and can help physicians to monitor the progression of the disease.
</abstract>

Introduction: Quantification of lung involvement in COVID-19 using chest Computed tomography (CT) scan can help physicians to evaluate the progression of the disease or treatment response. This paper presents an automatic deep transfer learning ensemble based on pre-trained convolutional neural networks (CNNs) to determine the severity of COVID -19 as normal, mild, moderate, and severe based on the images of the lungs CT.
Material and methods: In this study, two different deep transfer learning strategies were used. In the first procedure, features were extracted from fifteen pre-trained CNNs architectures and then fed into a support vector machine (SVM) classifier. In the second procedure, the pre-trained CNNs were fine-tuned using the chest CT images, and then features were extracted for the purpose of classification by the softmax layer. Finally, an ensemble method was developed based on majority voting of the deep learning outputs to increase the performance of the recognition on each of the two strategies. A dataset of CT scans was collected and then labeled as normal (314), mild (262), moderate (72), and severe (35) for COVID-19 by the consensus of two highly qualified radiologists.
Results: The ensemble of five deep transfer learning outputs named EfficientNetB3, EfficientNetB4, InceptionV3, NasNetMobile, and ResNext50 in the second strategy has better results than the first strategy and also the individual deep transfer learning models in diagnosing the severity of COVID-19 with 85% accuracy.
Conclusions: Our proposed study is well suited for quantifying lung involvement of COVID-19 and can help physicians to monitor the progression of the disease.

Automatic diagnosis of severity of COVID-19 patients using an ensemble of transfer learning models with convolutional neural networks in CT images

Biomedical Engineering and Medical Physics Department

Shahid Beheshti University of Medical Sciences

Department of Biomedical Engineering, Science and Research Branch

Department of Radiology, Faculty of Medicine

Iran University of Science and Technology

Polish Journal of Medical Physics and Engineering

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

Introduction: Quantification of lung involvement in COVID-19 using chest Computed tomography (CT) scan can help physicians to evaluate the progression of the...

Automatic diagnosis of severity of COVID-19 patients using an ensemble of transfer learning models with convolutional neural networks in CT images

Published Online: Jul 28, 2022

Page range: 117 - 126

Received: Mar 23, 2022

Accepted: Jul 04, 2022

DOI: https://doi.org/10.2478/pjmpe-2022-0014

Keywords
severity of COVID-19, convolutional neural network, ensemble

© 2022 Ahmad Shalbaf et al., published by Sciendo

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

Automatic diagnosis of severity of COVID-19 patients using an ensemble of transfer learning models with convolutional neural networks in CT images

Published Online: Jul 28, 2022

Page range: 117 - 126

Received: Mar 23, 2022

Accepted: Jul 04, 2022

DOI: https://doi.org/10.2478/pjmpe-2022-0014

Keywordsseverity of COVID-19, convolutional neural network, ensemble

© 2022 Ahmad Shalbaf et al., published by Sciendo

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

Keywords
severity of COVID-19, convolutional neural network, ensemble