SS-TBN: A Semi-Supervised Tri-Branch Network for COVID-19 Screening and Lesion Segmentation

Insufficient annotated data and minor lung lesions pose big challenges for computed tomography (CT)-aided automatic COVID-19 diagnosis at an early outbreak stage. To address this issue, we propose a Semi-Supervised Tri-Branch Network (SS-TBN). First, we develop a joint TBN model for dual-task applic...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:IEEE transactions on pattern analysis and machine intelligence 2023-08, Vol.45 (8), p.10427-10442
Main Authors: Zeng, Ling-Li, Gao, Kai, Hu, Dewen, Feng, Zhichao, Hou, Chenping, Rong, Pengfei, Wang, Wei
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Algorithms
Computed tomography
COVID-19
COVID-19 Testing
CT image
Datasets
deep learning
Diagnosis
Humans
Image classification
Image segmentation
Labeling
Lesions
Lung
Machine learning
Medical imaging
Outbreaks
Regularization
Regularization methods
Screening
Semi-supervised learning
Supervised Machine Learning
Training
Viral diseases
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Summary:Insufficient annotated data and minor lung lesions pose big challenges for computed tomography (CT)-aided automatic COVID-19 diagnosis at an early outbreak stage. To address this issue, we propose a Semi-Supervised Tri-Branch Network (SS-TBN). First, we develop a joint TBN model for dual-task application scenarios of image segmentation and classification such as CT-based COVID-19 diagnosis, in which pixel-level lesion segmentation and slice-level infection classification branches are simultaneously trained via lesion attention, and individual-level diagnosis branch aggregates slice-level outputs for COVID-19 screening. Second, we propose a novel hybrid semi-supervised learning method to make full use of unlabeled data, combining a new double-threshold pseudo labeling method specifically designed to the joint model and a new inter-slice consistency regularization method specifically tailored to CT images. Besides two publicly available external datasets, we collect internal and our own external datasets including 210,395 images (1,420 cases versus 498 controls) from ten hospitals. Experimental results show that the proposed method achieves state-of-the-art performance in COVID-19 classification with limited annotated data even if lesions are subtle, and that segmentation results promote interpretability for diagnosis, suggesting the potential of the SS-TBN in early screening in insufficient labeled data situations at the early stage of a pandemic outbreak like COVID-19.
ISSN:0162-8828
1939-3539
2160-9292
DOI:10.1109/TPAMI.2023.3240886