Improved UNET Architecture for Effective COVID-19 Severity Prediction from Pulmonary CT Images

COVID-19, is one of the deadliest pandemic hit globally crises in the recent years, continues to persist with emerging variants of concern. Due to the virus's high transmissibility, rapid and precise detection of COVID-19 is crucial for timely medical intervention. This research presents an advanced deep transfer learning approach for quantifying the severity of COVID-19 infection from CT lung images. Using computer vision techniques, lung regions were extracted from CT scans through semantic segmentation using SegNet. An enhanced U-Net architecture, integrated with the Atrous Spatial Pyramid Pooling (ASPP) technique, was employed to semantically segment the infected regions of the lungs. Based on the segmented infection areas, the severity of the infection was classified into mild, moderate, and severe. The proposed framework, which incorporates lung extraction followed by Ground-Glass Opacity (GGO) segmentation, achieves the segmentation accuracy of 96% and a prediction accuracy of 98.9%.