Attention-based Automated Chest CT Image Segmentation Method of COVID-19 Lung Infection

According to the World Health Organization, Artificial Intelligence (AI) technology may assist in COVID-19 management. However, existing image segmentation using AI suffers from a lack of accuracy and explainability, which prevents its adoption in actual clinical practice. In this paper, we investigated an attention-based image segmentation method for COVID-19 CT imaging with enhanced interpretation capabilities. Specifically, we developed U-Net architecture-based for segmentation with attention coefficients to produce a salient feature map. We use the DICE score and accuracy to perform a comprehensive model evaluation. We compared to other well-known methods such as Light U-Net, COPLE-Net, and Res U-Net and demonstrated that attention U-Net is superior for COVID-19 segmentation tasks in terms of performance and explainability. We also developed the tool as a web-application with a graphic user interface with the goal to translate this AI-driven clinical decision-support system for real-world clinical use.