Mathematical morphology is a technique frequently used in image processing, it has several applications such as segmentation, filtering, compression, edge detection, and feature extraction. Considering this last application here is presented a morphological and convolutional neural network (MCNN) that takes advantage of the different types of morphological operations – erosion, dilation, opening, and closing – by including them in a single layer. Three independent neural networks are used to learn information per channel, Random Forest is used at the end, fed with the three outputs of the NNs. The classification performance of the method was compared against three common CNN architectures: ResNet-18, ShuffleNet-V2, and MobileNet-V2. Two training approaches were used: training from scratch and using transfer learning. A glaucoma classification was conducted using the ORIGA dataset. The MCNN method obtained an AUC of 0.704 (0.672, 0.743 95% CI) with a performance similar to the other CNN methods when trained using transfer learning.
Significance: There is a scarcity of published research on the potential role of thermal imaging in the remote detection of respiratory issues due to coronavirus disease-19 (COVID-19). This is a comprehensive study that explores the potential of this imaging technology resulting from its convenient aspects that make it highly accessible: it is contactless, noninvasive, and devoid of harmful radiation effects, and it does not require a complicated installation process.
Aim: We aim to investigate the role of thermal imaging, specifically thermal video, for the identification of SARS-CoV-2-infected people using infrared technology and to explore the role of breathing patterns in different parts of the thorax for the identification of possible COVID-19 infection.
Approach: We used signal moment, signal texture, and shape moment features extracted from five different body regions of interest (whole upper body, chest, face, back, and side) of images obtained from thermal video clips in which optical flow and super-resolution were used. These features were classified into positive and negative COVID-19 using machine learning strategies.
Results: COVID-19 detection for male models [receiver operating characteristic (ROC) area under the ROC curve (AUC) = 0.605 95% confidence intervals (CI) 0.58 to 0.64] is more reliable than for female models (ROC AUC = 0.577 95% CI 0.55 to 0.61). Overall, thermal imaging is not very sensitive nor specific in detecting COVID-19; the metrics were below 60% except for the chest view from males.
Conclusions: We conclude that, although it may be possible to remotely identify some individuals affected by COVID-19, at this time, the diagnostic performance of current methods for body thermal imaging is not good enough to be used as a mass screening tool.
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