# CovTANet: A Hybrid Tri-level Attention Based Network for Lesion Segmentation, Diagnosis, and Severity Prediction of COVID-19 Chest CT Scans

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2101.00691 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.00691/

## Key facts

- Cited by 4 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 16 of its 33 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 3 Jan 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 16 of 16)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [U-Net: Convolutional Networks for Biomedical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.04597/) (2015)
- [Fully Convolutional Networks for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1411.4038/) (2014)
- [Squeeze-and-Excitation Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.01507/) (2017)
- [V-Net: Fully Convolutional Neural Networks for Volumetric Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.04797/) (2016)
- [Attention U-Net: Learning Where to Look for the Pancreas](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.03999/) (2018)
- [Multi-Scale Context Aggregation by Dilated Convolutions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.07122/) (2015)
- [UNet++: Redesigning Skip Connections to Exploit Multiscale Features in Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.05074/) (2019)
- [Attention Gated Networks: Learning to Leverage Salient Regions in Medical Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.08114/) (2018)
- [MultiResUNet : Rethinking the U-Net Architecture for Multimodal Biomedical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.04049/) (2019)
- [Inf-Net: Automatic COVID-19 Lung Infection Segmentation from CT Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.14133/) (2020)
- [A Novel Focal Tversky loss function with improved Attention U-Net for lesion segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.07842/) (2018)
- [MosMedData: Chest CT Scans With COVID-19 Related Findings Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.06465/) (2020)
- [Multi-scale self-guided attention for medical image segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.02849/) (2019)
- [Review of Artificial Intelligence Techniques in Imaging Data Acquisition, Segmentation and Diagnosis for COVID-19](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.02731/) (2020)
- [MiniSeg: An Extremely Minimum Network for Efficient COVID-19 Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.09750/) (2020)

## Built on by (most cited first, 4 of 4)

- [TB-ICT: A Trustworthy Blockchain-Enabled System for Indoor COVID-19 Contact Tracing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.08275/) (2021)
- [DACov: A Deeper Analysis of Data Augmentation on the Computed Tomography Segmentation Problem](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.05912/) (2023)
- [COVID-19 identification from volumetric chest CT scans using a progressively resized 3D-CNN incorporating segmentation, augmentation, and class-rebalancing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.06169/) (2021)
- [COVID-19 Infection Segmentation from Chest CT Images Based on Scale Uncertainty](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.03053/) (2022)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Rapid and precise diagnosis of COVID-19 is one of the major challenges faced by the global community to control the spread of this overgrowing pandemic. In this paper, a hybrid neural network is proposed, named CovTANet, to provide an end-to-end clinical diagnostic tool for early diagnosis, lesion segmentation, and severity prediction of COVID-19 utilizing chest computer tomography (CT) scans. A multi-phase optimization strategy is introduced for solving the challenges of complicated diagnosis at a very early stage of infection, where an efficient lesion segmentation network is optimized initially which is later integrated into a joint optimization framework for the diagnosis and severity prediction tasks providing feature enhancement of the infected regions. Moreover, for overcoming the challenges with diffused, blurred, and varying shaped edges of COVID lesions with novel and diverse characteristics, a novel segmentation network is introduced, namely Tri-level Attention-based Segmentation Network (TA-SegNet). This network has significantly reduced semantic gaps in subsequent encoding decoding stages, with immense parallelization of multi-scale features for faster convergence providing considerable performance improvement over traditional networks. Furthermore, a novel tri-level attention mechanism has been introduced, which is repeatedly utilized over the network, combining channel, spatial, and pixel attention schemes for faster and efficient generalization of contextual information embedded in the feature map through feature re-calibration and enhancement operations. Outstanding performances have been achieved in all three-tasks through extensive experimentation on a large publicly available dataset containing 1110 chest CT-volumes that signifies the effectiveness of the proposed scheme at the current stage of the pandemic.