# COVID-Net US: A Tailored, Highly Efficient, Self-Attention Deep Convolutional Neural Network Design for Detection of COVID-19 Patient Cases from Point-of-care Ultrasound Imaging

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2108.03131 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.03131/

## Key facts

- Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 16 of its 23 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 5 Aug 2021.

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

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [Very Deep Convolutional Networks for Large-Scale Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.1556/) (2014)
- [Neural Machine Translation by Jointly Learning to Align and Translate](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.0473/) (2014)
- [DARTS: Differentiable Architecture Search](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.09055/) (2018)
- [COVID-Net: A Tailored Deep Convolutional Neural Network Design for Detection of COVID-19 Cases from Chest X-Ray Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.09871/) (2020)
- [COVIDNet-CT: A Tailored Deep Convolutional Neural Network Design for Detection of COVID-19 Cases from Chest CT Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.05383/) (2020)
- [Do Explanations Reflect Decisions? A Machine-centric Strategy to Quantify the Performance of Explainability Algorithms](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.07387/) (2019)
- [NetScore: Towards Universal Metrics for Large-scale Performance Analysis of Deep Neural Networks for Practical On-Device Edge Usage](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.05512/) (2018)
- [COVID-Net CT-2: Enhanced Deep Neural Networks for Detection of COVID-19 from Chest CT Images Through Bigger, More Diverse Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.07433/) (2021)
- [POCOVID-Net: Automatic Detection of COVID-19 From a New Lung Ultrasound Imaging Dataset (POCUS)](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.12084/) (2020)
- [FermiNets: Learning generative machines to generate efficient neural networks via generative synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.05989/) (2018)
- [Task Transfer by Preference-Based Cost Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.04686/) (2018)
- [COVIDx-US -- An open-access benchmark dataset of ultrasound imaging data for AI-driven COVID-19 analytics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.10003/) (2021)
- [COVID-Net S: Towards computer-aided severity assessment via training and validation of deep neural networks for geographic extent and opacity extent scoring of chest X-rays for SARS-CoV-2 lung disease severity](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.12855/) (2020)
- [AttendNets: Tiny Deep Image Recognition Neural Networks for the Edge via Visual Attention Condensers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.14385/) (2020)
- [Implementing a Detection System for COVID-19 based on Lung Ultrasound Imaging and Deep Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.10651/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 3 of 3)

- [COVID-Net USPro: An Open-Source Explainable Few-Shot Deep Prototypical Network to Monitor and Detect COVID-19 Infection from Point-of-Care Ultrasound Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.01679/) (2023)
- [COVID-Net US-X: Enhanced Deep Neural Network for Detection of COVID-19 Patient Cases from Convex Ultrasound Imaging Through Extended Linear-Convex Ultrasound Augmentation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.13851/) (2022)
- [COVID-Net UV: An End-to-End Spatio-Temporal Deep Neural Network Architecture for Automated Diagnosis of COVID-19 Infection from Ultrasound Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.08932/) (2022)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic has impacted many aspects of life globally, and a critical factor in mitigating its effects is screening individuals for infections, thereby allowing for both proper treatment for those individuals as well as action to be taken to prevent further spread of the virus. Point-of-care ultrasound (POCUS) imaging has been proposed as a screening tool as it is a much cheaper and easier to apply imaging modality than others that are traditionally used for pulmonary examinations, namely chest x-ray and computed tomography. Given the scarcity of expert radiologists for interpreting POCUS examinations in many highly affected regions around the world, low-cost deep learning-driven clinical decision support solutions can have a large impact during the on-going pandemic. Motivated by this, we introduce COVID-Net US, a highly efficient, self-attention deep convolutional neural network design tailored for COVID-19 screening from lung POCUS images. Experimental results show that the proposed COVID-Net US can achieve an AUC of over 0.98 while achieving 353X lower architectural complexity, 62X lower computational complexity, and 14.3X faster inference times on a Raspberry Pi. Clinical validation was also conducted, where select cases were reviewed and reported on by a practicing clinician (20 years of clinical practice) specializing in intensive care (ICU) and 15 years of expertise in POCUS interpretation. To advocate affordable healthcare and artificial intelligence for resource-constrained environments, we have made COVID-Net US open source and publicly available as part of the COVID-Net open source initiative.