COVLIAS 1.0 vs. MedSeg: Artificial Intelligence-Based Comparative Study for Automated COVID-19 Computed Tomography Lung Segmentation in Italian and Croatian Cohorts
Authors: Suri Jasjit S. , Agarwal Sushant , Carriero Alessandro , Paschè Alessio , Danna Pietro S. C. , Columbu Marta , Saba Luca , Viskovic Klaudija , Mehmedović Armin , Agarwal Samriddhi , Gupta Lakshya , Faa Gavino , Singh Inder M. , Turk Monika , Chadha Paramjit S. , Johri Amer M. , Khanna Narendra N. , Mavrogeni Sophie , Laird John R. , Pareek Gyan , Miner Martin , Sobel David W. , Balestrieri Antonella , Sfikakis Petros P. , Tsoulfas George , Protogerou Athanasios , Misra Durga Prasanna , Agarwal Vikas , Kitas George D. , Teji Jagjit S. , Al-Maini Mustafa , Dhanjil Surinder K. , Nicolaides Andrew , Sharma Aditya , Rathore Vijay , Fatemi Mostafa , Alizad Azra , Krishnan Pudukode R. , Nagy Ferenc , Ruzsa Zoltan , Gupta Archna , Naidu Subbaram , Paraskevas Kosmas I. , Kalra Mannudeep K. 
Published: December 2021

(1) Background: COVID-19 computed tomography (CT) lung segmentation is critical for COVID lung severity diagnosis. Earlier proposed approaches during 2020–2021 were semiautomated or automated but not accurate, user-friendly, and industry-standard benchmarked. The proposed study compared the COVID Lung Image Analysis System, COVLIAS 1.0 (GBTI, Inc., and AtheroPointTM, Roseville, CA, USA, referred to as COVLIAS), against MedSeg, a web-based Artificial Intelligence (AI) segmentation tool, where COVLIAS uses hybrid deep learning (HDL) models for CT lung segmentation. (2) Materials and Methods: The proposed study used 5000 ITALIAN COVID-19 positive CT lung images collected from 72 patients (experimental data) that confirmed the reverse transcription-polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR) test. Two hybrid AI models from the COVLIAS system, namely, VGG-SegNet (HDL 1) and ResNet-SegNet (HDL 2), were used to segment the CT lungs. As part of the results, we compared both COVLIAS and MedSeg against two manual delineations (MD 1 and MD 2) using (i) Bland–Altman plots, (ii) Correlation coefficient (CC) plots, (iii) Receiver operating characteristic curve, and (iv) Figure of Merit and (v) visual overlays. A cohort of 500 CROATIA COVID-19 positive CT lung images (validation data) was used. A previously trained COVLIAS model was directly applied to the validation data (as part of Unseen-AI) to segment the CT lungs and compare them against MedSeg. (3) Result: For the experimental data, the four CCs between COVLIAS (HDL 1) vs. MD 1, COVLIAS (HDL 1) vs. MD 2, COVLIAS (HDL 2) vs. MD 1, and COVLIAS (HDL 2) vs. MD 2 were 0.96, 0.96, 0.96, and 0.96, respectively. The mean value of the COVLIAS system for the above four readings was 0.96. CC between MedSeg vs. MD 1 and MedSeg vs. MD 2 was 0.98 and 0.98, respectively. Both had a mean value of 0.98. On the validation data, the CC between COVLIAS (HDL 1) vs. MedSeg and COVLIAS (HDL 2) vs. MedSeg was 0.98 and 0.99, respectively. For the experimental data, the difference between the mean values for COVLIAS and MedSeg showed a difference of <2.5%, meeting the standard of equivalence. The average running times for COVLIAS and MedSeg on a single lung CT slice were ~4 s and ~10 s, respectively. (4) Conclusions: The performances of COVLIAS and MedSeg were similar. However, COVLIAS showed improved computing time over MedSeg.