Multi-feature Multi-Scale CNN-Derived COVID-19 Classification from Lung Ultrasound Data

The global pandemic of the novel coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) has put tremendous pressure on the medical system. Imaging plays a complementary role in the management of patients with COVID-19. Computed tomography (CT) and chest X-ray (CXR) are the two dominant screening tools. However, difficulty in eliminating the risk of disease transmission, radiation exposure and not being cost-effective are some of the challenges for CT and CXR imaging. This fact induces the implementation of lung ultrasound (LUS) for evaluating COVID-19 due to its practical advantages of noninvasiveness, repeatability, and sensitive bedside property. In this paper, we utilize a deep learning model to perform the classification of COVID-19 from LUS data, which could produce objective diagnostic information for clinicians. Specifically, all LUS images are processed to obtain their corresponding local phase filtered images and radial symmetry transformed images before fed into the multi-scale residual convolutional neural network (CNN). Secondly, image combination as the input of the network is used to explore rich and reliable features. Feature fusion strategy at different levels is adopted to investigate the relationship between the depth of feature aggregation and the classification accuracy. Our proposed method is evaluated on the point-of-care US (POCUS) dataset together with the Italian COVID-19 Lung US database (ICLUS-DB) and shows promising performance for COVID-19 prediction.