AUTOMATED SEGMENTATION OF COVID-19 REGIONS FROM LUNG CT IMAGES USING WATERSHED ALGORITHM AND CLASSIFICATION USING MACHINE LEARNING CLASSIFIERS

The COVID-19 pandemic originated in Wuhan, China in December 2019 and has since affected over 200 countries worldwide. The highly contagious Coronavirus primarily affects the respiratory system, causing pulmonary inflammation that can be visualized through medical imaging such as CT and X-rays. Conventional testing methods include PCR and antibody tests. Shortage of test kits in hospitals as well as time taken for results to be received can be compensated through medical imaging. Therefore, there is a need for an automated system, which is accurate and robust in detection of Covid-19 from medical radiographs for clinical practice. The objectives of our study are as follows: (i) To segment the lung CT images using a hybrid watershed and fuzzy c-means algorithm. (2) To extract various textural features using the GLCM algorithm. (iii) To implement machine learning classifiers for classification of COVID and non-COVID image classes. Our dataset consisting of 60 chest CT images of COVID-19 and non-COVID-19 patients was pre-processed and segmented using a hybrid watershed and fuzzy c-means algorithm. Then, textural features were extracted from the segmented ROI using the GLCM algorithm. Finally, the images were classified into COVID and non-COVID classes using three machine learning classifiers namely Naive Bayes, SVM and K-star. Naive Bayes classifier achieved the highest accuracy of 95%, while SVM achieved 93% accuracy. The ROC curves were also obtained, with AUC of 0.98. Thus, our proposed system has shown promising results in the classification of lung CT images into the two classes namely COVID and non-COVID.