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

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.