Abstract
PURPOSE: Corona virus disease 2019 (COVID-19) is threatening the health of the global people and bringing great losses to our economy and society. However, computed tomography (CT) image segmentation can make clinicians quickly identify the COVID-19-infected regions. Accurate segmentation infection area of COVID-19 can contribute screen confirmed cases. METHODS: We designed a segmentation network for COVID-19-infected regions in CT images. To begin with, multilayered features were extracted by the backbone network of Res2Net. Subsequently, edge features of the infected regions in the low-level feature f(2) were extracted by the edge attention module. Second, we carefully designed the structure of the attention position module (APM) to extract high-level feature f(5) and detect infected regions. Finally, we proposed a context exploration module consisting of two parallel explore blocks, which can remove some false positives and false negatives to reach more accurate segmentation results. RESULTS: Experimental results show that, on the public COVID-19 dataset, the Dice, sensitivity, specificity, Sα , E∅mean , and mean absolute error (MAE) of our method are 0.755, 0.751, 0.959, 0.795, 0.919, and 0.060, respectively. Compared with the latest COVID-19 segmentation model Inf-Net, the Dice similarity coefficient of our model has increased by 7.3%; the sensitivity (Sen) has increased by 5.9%. On contrary, the MAE has dropped by 2.2%. CONCLUSIONS: Our method performs well on COVID-19 CT image segmentation. We also find that our method is so portable that can be suitable for various current popular networks. In a word, our method can help screen people infected with COVID-19 effectively and save the labor power of clinicians and radiologists.