COVID-19 detection using ViT transformer-based approach from Computed Tomography Images

Abstract

In here, we introduce a novel approach to enhance the accuracy and efficiency of COVID-19 diagnosis using CT images. Leveraging state-of-the-art Transformer models in computer vision, we employed the base ViT Transformer configured for 224x224-sized input images, modifying the output to suit the binary classification task. Notably, input images were resized from the standard CT scan size of 512x512 to match the model's expectations. Our method implements a systematic patient-level prediction strategy, classifying individual CT slices as COVID-19 or non-COVID. To determine the overall diagnosis for each patient, a majority voting approach as well as other thresholding approaches were employed. This method involves evaluating all CT slices for a given patient and assigning the patient the diagnosis that relates to the thresholding for the CT scan. This meticulous patient-level prediction process contributes to the robustness of our solution as it starts from 2D-slices to 3D-patient level. Throughout the evaluation process, our approach resulted in 0.7 macro F1 score on the COV19-CT -DB validation set. To ensure the reliability and effectiveness of our model, we rigorously validate it on the extensive COV-19 CT dataset, which is meticulously annotated for the task. This dataset, with its comprehensive annotations, reinforces the overall robustness of our solution.