As we continue to face the rapid increase in confirmed Coronavirus cases around the world, we created an AI-based pneumonia detection platform for COVID-19. The system is able to automatically detect high-risk patients with pneumonia that will then send information to doctors. With that information, the doctors are then able to make follow-up decisions and provide a treatment plan after the diagnosis. In specific, doctors from the Department of Medical Imaging provided us thousands of positive and negative chest x-rays for pneumonia as a training set. Our system has already been tested with and adopted by doctors at the NCKU Hospital. The system achieved 95% accuracy to detect the pneumonia symptom, based on 1400 test images.

With the rise in computing power, deep-learning based computer-aided diagnosis systems have gained interest in the research community. Our system process the images to assist doctors to determine whether the patients have nodules in lungs. Meanwhile, we utilized the Feature Pyramid Network to extend the receptive field on the convolutional kernel, which improved the performance on the nodule detection with various locations in CXR. The semi-supervised learning mechanism also achieves the way of soft-annotation to reduce human effort in medical image annotation.