Indian-COVID-19 CT Dataset and Analysis of Chest CT Scans of COVID-19 Patients Using Lightweight CNN

S Suba, Nita Parekh, Ramesh Loganathan, Vikram Pudi, Chinnababu Sunkavalli

Keywords: COVID-19, Convolutional Neural Networks, Computed Tomography Scans, Indian-CT

TL;DR: Analysis of Chest CT scans of Indian COVID-19 patients using CNN

Abstract: Indian-COVID-19 CT is the chest Computed Tomography (CT) images from COVID-19 patients from India. It has been collected and curated to aid in the diagnosis of COVID-19 and other chest CT analysis tasks using machine learning algorithms. Currently it consists of 6174 images from 142 patients COVID-19, obtained from a single hospital with same image acquisition clinical settings. The dataset will be regularly updated to include more data and the original 3D volumes of dicoms will also be made available. It does not include normal or any other pneumonia images like other similar repositories. It would provide researchers opportunities to develop generalizable and robust models for COVID-19 detection and for developing models for other lung disease detection tasks. To the best of our knowledge, this is the only dataset available from Indian population making it a valuable addition to other similar repositories. Here we also propose a lightweight Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) model to classify chest CT scans into three classes, viz., Normal, non-Covid Pneumonia and COVID-19. The model has been trained and validated on publicly available dataset COVIDx-CT dataset [1]. Performance of the model is evaluated on both COVIDx-CT and Indian-COVID-19 CT datasets and is observed to be comparable, with accuracy slightly lower on Indian-COVID-19 CT dataset. This is not surprising as it is an external test set not seen by the model during training. The proposed lightweight model for diagnosing COVID-19 is well suited for a clinical setting. However, the model is still a prototype and needs more rigorous testing and re-calibrations before using it for clinical diagnosis. The dataset will be made available at http://aimedhub.iiit.ac.in/datasets/gandhi-hospital-covid-dataset.