A Novel Computational Model for Detecting the Severity of Inflammation in Confirmed COVID-19 Patients Using Chest X-ray Images

Abstract

Since late 2019, Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) has spread all over the world. The disease is highly contagious, and it may lead to acute respiratory distress (ARD). Medical imaging can play an important role in classifying, detecting, and measuring the severity of the virus. This study aims to provide a novel auto-detection tool that can detect abnormal changes in conventional X-ray images for confirmed COVID-19 cases. X-ray images from patients diagnosed with COVID-19 were converted into 19 different colored layers. Each layer represented objects with similar contrast that could be defined as a specific color. The objects with similar contrasts were formed in a single layer. All the objects from all the layers were extracted as a single-color image. Based on the differentiation of colors, the prototype model was able to recognize a wide spectrum of abnormal changes in the image texture. This was true even if there was minimal variation of the contrast values of the detected uncleared abnormalities. The results indicate that the proposed novel method can detect and determine the degree of lung infection from COVID-19 with an accuracy of 91%, compared to the opinions of three experienced radiologists. The method can also efficiently determine the sites of infection and the severity of the disease by classifying the X-rays into five levels of severity. Thus, the proposed COVID-19 autodetection method can identify locations and indicate the degree of severity of the disease by comparing affected tissue with healthy tissue, and it can predict where the disease may spread.

Geotourism, a New Perspective of Post-COVID-19-Pandemic Relaunch through Travel Agencies—Case Study: Bucegi Natural Park, Romania

“…COVID-19 was detected for the first time in November 2019 in the city of Wuhan [34][35][36]. SARS-CoV-2 has been described in the specialised literature as being contagious [37][38][39] and catastrophic for the tourism and hospitality industry in the period of 2020-2022 [40][41][42][43][44].…”

COVID-19 Associated Guillain–Barré Syndrome: A Report of Nine New Cases and a Review of the Literature

“…Since its emergence in December 2019 in Wuhan, China, Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) has been spreading worldwide at an alarming pace, with 244,385,444 confirmed cases and 4,961,489 deaths at the time of writing, according to the World Health Organization [ 1 ]. As the name suggests, SARSV-CoV-2 (Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus 2) predominantly affects the respiratory system, ranging from mild bilateral pneumonia to acute respiratory distress syndrome [ 2 ] due to an excessive increase in pro-inflammatory cytokine levels [ 3 ], after which in up to 97.7% of cases, pulmonary parenchyma alterations such as linear bands, ground-glass opacities, reticulations, bronchiolectasis, consolidations, bronchiectasis and volume loss may persist at least three months after the disease is detected by chest CT [ 4 ] or chest X-ray using a computational model [ 5 ]. However, numerous extra-respiratory manifestations (cardiac, gastrointestinal, hepatic, renal, neurological, olfactory, gustatory, ocular, cutaneous, and hematologic) have been reported as well [ 2 , 6 ].…”