2022/07/22 by Pierre Raillard, Raillard, Pierre, Lorenzo Cristoni +15
Medicine · #COVID-19 diagnosis using AI #Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (cs.CV) #FOS: Computer and information sciences #FOS: Electrical engineering #Image and Video Processing (eess.IV) #Lung Cancer Diagnosis and Treatment #Ultrasound in Clinical Applications #electronic engineering #information engineering
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2207.10998
openalex publication_date 2022/07/22 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
Artificial intelligence-based analysis of lung ultrasound imaging has been demonstrated as an effective technique for rapid diagnostic decision support throughout the COVID-19 pandemic. However, such techniques can require days- or weeks-long training processes and hyper-parameter tuning to develop intelligent deep learning image analysis models. This work focuses on leveraging 'off-the-shelf' pre-trained models as deep feature extractors for scoring disease severity with minimal training time. We propose using pre-trained initializations of existing methods ahead of simple and compact neural networks to reduce reliance on computational capacity. This reduction of computational capacity is of critical importance in time-limited or resource-constrained circumstances, such as the early stages of a pandemic. On a dataset of 49 patients, comprising over 20,000 images, we demonstrate that the use of existing methods as feature extractors results in the effective classification of COVID-19-related pneumonia severity while requiring only minutes of training time. Our methods can achieve an accuracy of over 0.93 on a 4-level severity score scale and provides comparable per-patient region and global scores compared to expert annotated ground truths. These results demonstrate the capability for rapid deployment and use of such minimally-adapted methods for progress monitoring, patient stratification and management in clinical practice for COVID-19 patients, and potentially in other respiratory diseases.