A semi-automatic ultrasound image analysis system for the grading diagnosis of COVID-19 pneumonia

This paper proposes a semi-automatic system based on quantitative characterization of the specific image patterns in lung ultrasound (LUS) images, in order to assess the lung conditions of patients with COVID-19 pneumonia, as well as to differentiate between the severe / and no-severe cases. Specifically, four parameters are extracted from each LUS image, namely the thickness (TPL) and roughness (RPL) of the pleural line, and the accumulated with (AWBL) and acoustic coefficient (ACBL) of B lines. 27 patients are enrolled in this study, which are grouped into 13 moderate patients, 7 severe patients and 7 critical patients. Furthermore, the severe and critical patients are regarded as the severe cases, and the moderate patients are regarded as the non-severe cases. Biomarkers among different groups are compared. Each single biomarker and a classifier with all the biomarkers as input are utilized for the binary diagnosis of severe case and non-severe case, respectively. The classifier achieves the best classification performance among all the compared methods (area under the receiver operating characteristics curve = 0.93, sensitivity = 0.93, specificity = 0.85). The proposed image analysis system could be potentially applied to the grading and prognosis evaluation of patients with COVID-19 pneumonia.