Scientific Reports (Jan 2024)

Potential diagnostic application of a novel deep learning- based approach for COVID-19

  • Alireza Sadeghi,
  • Mahdieh Sadeghi,
  • Ali Sharifpour,
  • Mahdi Fakhar,
  • Zakaria Zakariaei,
  • Mohammadreza Sadeghi,
  • Mojtaba Rokni,
  • Atousa Zakariaei,
  • Elham Sadat Banimostafavi,
  • Farshid Hajati

DOI
https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-023-50742-9
Journal volume & issue
Vol. 14, no. 1
pp. 1 – 19

Abstract

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Abstract COVID-19 is a highly communicable respiratory illness caused by the novel coronavirus SARS-CoV-2, which has had a significant impact on global public health and the economy. Detecting COVID-19 patients during a pandemic with limited medical facilities can be challenging, resulting in errors and further complications. Therefore, this study aims to develop deep learning models to facilitate automated diagnosis of COVID-19 from CT scan records of patients. The study also introduced COVID-MAH-CT, a new dataset that contains 4442 CT scan images from 133 COVID-19 patients, as well as 133 CT scan 3D volumes. We proposed and evaluated six different transfer learning models for slide-level analysis that are responsible for detecting COVID-19 in multi-slice spiral CT. Additionally, multi-head attention squeeze and excitation residual (MASERes) neural network, a novel 3D deep model was developed for patient-level analysis, which analyzes all the CT slides of a given patient as a whole and can accurately diagnose COVID-19. The codes and dataset developed in this study are available at https://github.com/alrzsdgh/COVID . The proposed transfer learning models for slide-level analysis were able to detect COVID-19 CT slides with an accuracy of more than 99%, while MASERes was able to detect COVID-19 patients from 3D CT volumes with an accuracy of 100%. These achievements demonstrate that the proposed models in this study can be useful for automatically detecting COVID-19 in both slide-level and patient-level from patients’ CT scan records, and can be applied for real-world utilization, particularly in diagnosing COVID-19 cases in areas with limited medical facilities.