Transfer learning for automated COVID-19 B-line classification in lung ultrasound
July 15, 2022
Conference Paper
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44th Annual Int. Conf. of IEEE Engineering in Medicine & Biology Society (EMBC), DOI: 10.1109/EMBC48229.2022.9871894.
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Summary
Lung ultrasound (LUS) as a diagnostic tool is gaining support for its role in the diagnosis and management of COVID-19 and a number of other lung pathologies. B-lines are a predominant feature in COVID-19, however LUS requires a skilled clinician to interpret findings. To facilitate the interpretation, our main objective was to develop automated methods to classify B-lines as pathologic vs. normal. We developed transfer learning models based on ResNet networks to classify B-lines as pathologic (at least 3 B-lines per lung field) vs. normal using COVID-19 LUS data. Assessment of B-line severity on a 0-4 multi-class scale was also explored. For binary B-line classification, at the frame-level, all ResNet models pretrained with ImageNet yielded higher performance than the baseline nonpretrained ResNet-18. Pretrained ResNet-18 has the best Equal Error Rate (EER) of 9.1% vs the baseline of 11.9%. At the clip-level, all pretrained network models resulted in better Cohen's kappa agreement (linear-weighted) and clip score accuracy, with the pretrained ResNet-18 having the best Cohen's kappa of 0.815 [95% CI: 0.804-0.826], and ResNet-101 the best clip scoring accuracy of 93.6%. Similar results were shown for multi-class scoring, where pretrained network models outperformed the baseline model. A class activation map is also presented to guide clinicians in interpreting LUS findings. Future work aims to further improve the multi-class assessment for severity of B-lines with a more diverse LUS dataset.