An effective U-net model for diagnosing Covid-19 infection

Abstract

Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) has become a pandemic all over the world and has spread rapidly. To distinguish between infected and non-infected areas, there is a critical need for segmentation methods that can identify infected areas from Chest Computed Tomography (CT) scans. In recent years, deep learning has become the most widely used approach for medical image segmentation, including the identification of infected areas in Chest CT scans. We propose an encoder-decoder based on the U-NET architecture for segmenting the MedSeg dataset, which contains lung CT scans. To study the effect of input dimensions on the model's output results, we gave CT images with dimensions of 224 × 224, 256 × 256, and 512 × 512 as inputs to the model. The results showed that 224 × 224 achieved higher results compared to 256 × 256 and 512 × 512, with a $dic{e}_{coef}$ of 81.36, accuracy of 87.65, sensitivity of 84.71, and specificity of 88.35. Additionally, the 224 × 224 input based on the proposed model achieved the highest number of correct answers compared to previous U-net methods. The proposed model can be applied as an effective screening tool to help primary service staff better refer suspected patients to specialists.