Lightweight Model For The Prediction of COVID-19 Through The Detection And Segmentation of Lesions in Chest CT Scans

We introduce a lightweight Mask R-CNN model that segments areas with the Ground Glass Opacity and Consolidation in chest CT scans. The model uses truncated ResNet18 and ResNet34 nets with a single layer of Feature Pyramid Network as a backbone net, thus substantially reducing the number of the parameters and the training time compared to similar solutions using deeper networks. Without any data balancing and manipulations, and using only a small fraction of the training data, COVID-CT-Mask-Net classification model with 6.12M total and 600K trainable parameters derived from Mask R-CNN, achieves 91.35% COVID-19 sensitivity, 91.63% Common Pneumonia sensitivity, 96.98% true negative rate and 93.95% overall accuracy on COVIDx-CT dataset (21191 images). We also present a thorough analysis of the regional features critical to the correct classification of the image. The full source code, models and pretrained weights are available on https://github.com/AlexTS1980/COVID-CT-Mask-Net.