Does non-COVID-19 lung lesion help? investigating transferability in COVID-19 CT image segmentation

•Investigating the transferability in COVID-19 CT segmentation.•Incorporating transferred lung lesion features from non-COVID19 datasets to gain significant improvement.•Evaluating four transfer learning methods on a publicly available COVID-19 CT dataset and three public non-COVID19 datasets.•Proposing a novel transfer learning strategy for COVID-19 dynamic feature selection and aggregation.•Transferability of COVID-19 model is crucial and helpful for doctors to make further assessment and quantifi cation.