A CT-based Prediction System for Determining Respiratory Support Level in COVID-19 Patients

A novel diagnostic system is introduced for assessing the required level of respiratory support for COVID-19 patients. It bases its assessments on the correlation between detected COVID-19 lesions and the respiratory support levels administered to the patients. The correlation with computed tomography (CT) scans will focus on three respiratory support levels, including minimal support (Level 0), non-invasive support (Level 1, such as soft oxygen), and invasive support (Level 3, e.g., mechanical ventilation). The system initially outlines the pulmonary regions from CT scans, then identifies COVID-19 lesions within these segmented lung regions. Subsequently, three second-order texture features are extracted from the identified COVID-19 lesion regions to detect differences and abnormalities across varying severity levels in COVID-19 cases. To obtain the suitable level of respiratory support for each patient, a fusion mechanism based on backpropagation neural network is utilized to integrate the diagnosis of these three features, individually generated by the support vector machine (SVM) classifier. The system’s performance is evaluated on 307 COVID-19 patients using a hold-out validation approach. This evaluation included various metrics, such as sensitivity, specificity, F1-score, Cohen’s kappa, and accuracy, demonstrating impressive results. Specifi-cally, it achieved a score of 97.25%, 98.56%, 97.26%, 95.79%, and 97.25%, respectively. The results demonstrate the effectiveness of the integrated system, which uses various second-order features, in predicting respiratory support needs for COVID-19 patients, outperforming both its individual components and other machine learning-based classification systems.