A deep adversarial model for segmentation-assisted COVID-19 diagnosis using CT images

The outbreak of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) is spreading rapidly around the world, resulting in a global pandemic. Imaging techniques such as computed tomography (CT) play an essential role in the diagnosis and treatment of the disease since lung infection or pneumonia is a common complication. However, training a deep network to learn how to diagnose COVID-19 rapidly and accurately in CT images and segment the infected regions like a radiologist is challenging. Since the infectious area is difficult to distinguish manually annotation, the segmentation results are time-consuming. To tackle these problems, we propose an efficient method based on a deep adversarial network to segment the infection regions automatically. Then, the predicted segment results can assist the diagnostic network in identifying the COVID-19 samples from the CT images. On the other hand, a radiologist-like segmentation network provides detailed information of the infectious regions by separating areas of ground-glass, consolidation, and pleural effusion, respectively. Our method can accurately predict the COVID-19 infectious probability and provide lesion regions in CT images with limited training data. Additionally, we have established a public dataset for multitask learning. Extensive experiments on diagnosis and segmentation show superior performance over state-of-the-art methods.