3D Visualization for Lung Surface Images of Covid-19 Patients based on U-Net CNN Segmentation

Abstract

The Covid-19 infection challenges medical staff to make rapid diagnoses of patients. In just a few days, the Covid-19 virus infection could affect the performance of the lungs. On the other hand, semantic segmentation using the Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) on Lung CT-scan images had attracted the attention of researchers for several years, even before the Covid-19 pandemic. Ground Glass Opacity (GGO), in the form of white patches caused by Covid-19 infection, is detected inside the patient’s lung area and occasionally at the edge of the lung, but no research has specifically paid attention to the edges of the lungs. This study proposes to display a 3D visualization of the lung surface of Covid-19 patients based on CT-scan image segmentation using U-Net architecture with a training dataset from typical lung images. Then the resulting CNN model is used to segment the lungs of Covid-19 patients. The segmentation results are selected as some slices to be reconstructed into a 3D lung shape and displayed in 3D animation. Visualizing the results of this segmentation can help medical staff diagnose the lungs of Covid-19 patients, especially on the surface of the lungs of patients with GGO at the edges. From the lung segmentation experiment results on ten patients in the Zenodo dataset, we have a Mean-IoU score = of 76.86%, while the visualization results show that 7 out of 10 patients (70%) have eroded lung surfaces. It can be seen clearly through 3D visualization.