A weakly supervised learning method based on attention fusion for Covid-19 segmentation in CT images

Abstract

Since the end of 2019, the COVID-19, which has swept across the world, has caused serious impacts on public health and economy. Although Reverse Transcription-Polymerase Chain Reaction (RT-PCR) is the gold standard for clinical diagnosis, it is very time-consuming and labor-intensive. At the same time, more and more people have doubted the sensitivity of RT-PCR. Therefore, Computed Tomography (CT) images are used as a substitute for RT-PCR. Powered by the research of the field of artificial intelligence, deep learning, which is a branch of machine learning, has made a great success on medical image segmentation. However, general full supervision methods require pixel-level point-by-point annotations, which is very costly. In this paper, we put forward an image segmentation method based on weakly supervised learning for CT images of COVID-19, which can effectively segment the lung infection area and doesn't require pixel-level labels. Our method is contrasted with another four weakly supervised learning methods in recent years, and the results have been significantly improved.