Reinforcement Learning Based Diagnosis and Prediction for COVID-19 by Optimizing a Mixed Cost Function From CT Images.

Journal: IEEE journal of biomedical and health informatics
Published Date:

Abstract

A novel coronavirus disease (COVID-19) is a pandemic disease has caused 4 million deaths and more than 200 million infections worldwide (as of August 4, 2021). Rapid and accurate diagnosis of COVID-19 infection is critical to controlling the spread of the epidemic. In order to quickly and efficiently detect COVID-19 and reduce the threat of COVID-19 to human survival, we have firstly proposed a detection framework based on reinforcement learning for COVID-19 diagnosis, which constructs a mixed loss function that can integrate the advantages of multiple loss functions. This paper uses the accuracy of the validation set as the reward value, and obtains the initial model for the next epoch by searching the model corresponding to the maximum reward value in each epoch. We also have proposed a prediction framework that integrates multiple detection frameworks using parameter sharing to predict the progression of patients' disease without additional training. This paper also constructed a higher-quality version of the CT image dataset containing 247 cases screened by professional physicians, and obtained more excellent results on this dataset. Meanwhile, we used the other two COVID-19 datasets as external verifications, and still achieved a high accuracy rate without additional training. Finally, the experimental results show that our classification accuracy can reach 98.31%, and the precision, sensitivity, specificity, and AUC (Area Under Curve) are 98.82%, 97.99%, 98.67%, and 0.989, respectively. The accuracy of external verification can reach 93.34% and 91.05%. What's more, the accuracy of our prediction framework is 91.54%. A large number of experiments demonstrate that our proposed method is effective and robust for COVID-19 detection and prediction.

Authors

  • Siying Chen
    School of Optics and Photonics, Beijing Institute of Technology, Beijing 100081, China.
  • Minghui Liu
  • Pan Deng
  • Jiali Deng
  • Yi Yuan
    School of Business, XI'AN University of Finance and Economics, Xi'an, Shaanxi, China.
  • Xuan Cheng
  • Tianshu Xie
  • Libo Xie
  • Wei Zhang
    The First Affiliated Hospital of Nanchang University, Nanchang, China.
  • Haigang Gong
  • Xiaomin Wang
    Key Laboratory of Grain and Oil Processing and Food Safety of Sichuan Province, College of Food and Bioengineering, Xihua University Chengdu 610039 China xingyage1@163.com.
  • Lifeng Xu
  • Hong Pu
    Department of Intensive Care Unit, West China Hospital of Sichuan University, Chengdu 610041, China.
  • Ming Liu
    School of Land Engineering, Chang'an University, Xi'an 710064, China; Xi'an Key Laboratory of Territorial Spatial Information, School of Land Engineering, Chang'an University, Xi'an 710064, China. Electronic address: mingliu@chd.edu.cn.