Open Access

ARTICLE

Adversarial Neural Network Classifiers for COVID-19 Diagnosis in Ultrasound Images

by Mohamed Esmail Karar^1,2, Marwa Ahmed Shouman³, Claire Chalopin^4,*

1 Department of Industrial Electronics and Control Engineering, Faculty of Electronic Engineering (FEE), Menoufia University, Menouf, 32952, Egypt
2 Department of Computer Engineering and Networks, College of Computing and Information Technology, Shaqra University, Shaqra, 11961, Saudi Arabia
3 Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Faculty of Electronic Engineering (FEE), Menoufia University, Menouf, 32952, Egypt
4 Innovation Center for Computer Assisted Surgery (ICCAS), Universität Leipzig, Leipzig, 04103, Germany

* Corresponding Author: Claire Chalopin. Email: -leipzig.de

(This article belongs to the Special Issue: Machine Learning Applications in Medical, Finance, Education and Cyber Security)

Computers, Materials & Continua 2022, 70(1), 1683-1697. https://doi.org/10.32604/cmc.2022.018564

Received 12 March 2021; Accepted 18 April 2021; Issue published 07 September 2021

Abstract

The novel Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic has begun in China and is still affecting thousands of patient lives worldwide daily. Although Chest X-ray and Computed Tomography are the gold standard medical imaging modalities for diagnosing potentially infected COVID-19 cases, applying Ultrasound (US) imaging technique to accomplish this crucial diagnosing task has attracted many physicians recently. In this article, we propose two modified deep learning classifiers to identify COVID-19 and pneumonia diseases in US images, based on generative adversarial neural networks (GANs). The proposed image classifiers are a semi-supervised GAN and a modified GAN with auxiliary classifier. Each one includes a modified discriminator to identify the class of the US image using semi-supervised learning technique, keeping its main function of defining the “realness” of tested images. Extensive tests have been successfully conducted on public dataset of US images acquired with a convex US probe. This study demonstrated the feasibility of using chest US images with two GAN classifiers as a new radiological tool for clinical check of COVID-19 patients. The results of our proposed GAN models showed that high accuracy values above 91.0% were obtained under different sizes of limited training data, outperforming other deep learning-based methods, such as transfer learning models in the recent studies. Consequently, the clinical implementation of our computer-aided diagnosis of US-COVID-19 is the future work of this study.

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