Portable Chest X-ray Synthetic Image Generation for the COVID-19 Screening

Abstract

[Abstract] The global pandemic of COVID-19 raises the importance of having fast and reliable methods to perform an early detection and to visualize the evolution of the disease in every patient, which can be assessed with chest X-ray imaging. Moreover, in order to reduce the risk of cross contamination, radiologists are asked to prioritize the use of portable chest X-ray devices that provide a lower quality and lower level of detail in comparison with the fixed machinery. In this context, computer-aided diagnosis systems are very useful. During the last years, for the case of medical imaging, they are widely developed using deep learning strategies. However, there is a lack of sufficient representative datasets of the COVID-19 affectation, which are critical for supervised learning when training deep models. In this work, we propose a fully automatic method to artificially increase the size of an original portable chest X-ray imaging dataset that was specifically designed for the COVID-19 diagnosis, which can be developed in a non-supervised manner and without requiring paired data. The results demonstrate that the method is able to perform a reliable screening despite all the problems associated with images provided by portable devices, providing an overall accuracy of 92.50%.