A Denoising Self-supervised Approach for COVID-19 Pneumonia Lesion Segmentation with Limited Annotated CT Images

The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) has become a global pandemic. The segmentation of COVID-19 pneumonia lesions from CT images is important in quantitative evaluation and assessment of the infection. Though many deep learning segmentation methods have been proposed, the performance is limited when pixel-level annotations are hard to obtain. In order to alleviate the performance limitation brought by the lack of pixel-level annotation in COVID-19 pneumonia lesion segmentation task, we construct a denoising self-supervised framework, which is composed of a pretext denoising task and a downstream segmentation task. Through the pretext denoising task, the semantic features from massive unlabelled data are learned in an unsupervised manner, so as to provide additional supervisory signal for the downstream segmentation task. Experimental results showed that our method can effectively leverage unlabelled images to improve the segmentation performance, and outperformed reconstruction-based self-supervised learning when only a small set of training images are annotated.Clinical relevance—The proposed method can effectively leverage unlabelled images to improve the performance for COVID-19 pneumonia lesion segmentation when only a small set of CT images are annotated.