One Shot Model For The Prediction of COVID-19 and Lesions Segmentation In Chest CT Scans Through The Affinity Among Lesion Mask Features

We introduce a model that segments lesions and predicts COVID-19 from chest CT scans through the derivation of an affinity matrix between lesion masks. The novelty of the methodology is based on the computation of the affinity between the lesion masks’ features extracted from the image. First, a batch of vectorized lesion masks is constructed. Then, the model learns the parameters of the affinity matrix that captures the relationship between features in each vector. Finally, the affinity is expressed as a single vector of pre-defined length. Without any complicated data manipulation, class balancing tricks, and using only a fraction of the training data, we achieve a 91.74% COVID-19 sensitivity, 85.35% common pneumonia sensitivity, 97.26% true negative rate and 91.94% F1-score. Ablation studies show that the method can quickly generalize to new datasets. All source code, models and results are publicly available on <ext-link xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink" ext-link-type="uri" xlink:href="https://github.com/AlexTS1980/COVID-Affinity-Model">https://github.com/AlexTS1980/COVID-Affinity-Model</ext-link>.