# PSGR: Pixel-wise Sparse Graph Reasoning for COVID-19 Pneumonia Segmentation in CT Images

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2108.03809 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.03809/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 29 of its 47 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 9 Aug 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 29 of 29)

- [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)
- [Semi-Supervised Classification with Graph Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.02907/) (2016)
- [Graph Attention Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.10903/) (2017)
- [Inductive Representation Learning on Large Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.02216/) (2017)
- [Fully Convolutional Networks for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1411.4038/) (2014)
- [Neural Message Passing for Quantum Chemistry](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.01212/) (2017)
- [DeepLab: Semantic Image Segmentation with Deep Convolutional Nets, Atrous Convolution, and Fully Connected CRFs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.00915/) (2016)
- [Encoder-Decoder with Atrous Separable Convolution for Semantic Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.02611/) (2018)
- [Pyramid Scene Parsing Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.01105/) (2016)
- [Non-local Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.07971/) (2017)
- [Rethinking Atrous Convolution for Semantic Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.05587/) (2017)
- [Convolutional Neural Networks on Graphs with Fast Localized Spectral Filtering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.09375/) (2016)
- [UNet++: A Nested U-Net Architecture for Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.10165/) (2018)
- [Attention U-Net: Learning Where to Look for the Pancreas](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.03999/) (2018)
- [Relational inductive biases, deep learning, and graph networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.01261/) (2018)
- [Dual Attention Network for Scene Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.02983/) (2018)
- [Weisfeiler and Leman Go Neural: Higher-order Graph Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.02244/) (2018)
- [GNNExplainer: Generating Explanations for Graph Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.03894/) (2019)
- [CCNet: Criss-Cross Attention for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.11721/) (2018)
- [U2-Net: Going Deeper with Nested U-Structure for Salient Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.09007/) (2020)
- [Inf-Net: Automatic COVID-19 Lung Infection Segmentation from CT Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.14133/) (2020)
- [Graph-Based Global Reasoning Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.12814/) (2018)
- [MosMedData: Chest CT Scans With COVID-19 Related Findings Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.06465/) (2020)
- [JCS: An Explainable COVID-19 Diagnosis System by Joint Classification and Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.07054/) (2020)
- [Spatial Pyramid Based Graph Reasoning for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.10211/) (2020)
- [Class-wise Dynamic Graph Convolution for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.09690/) (2020)
- [MiniSeg: An Extremely Minimum Network for Efficient COVID-19 Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.09750/) (2020)
- [CommPOOL: An Interpretable Graph Pooling Framework for Hierarchical Graph Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.05980/) (2020)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [An Accelerated Doubly Stochastic Gradient Method with Faster Explicit Model Identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.06058/) (2022)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Automated and accurate segmentation of the infected regions in computed tomography (CT) images is critical for the prediction of the pathological stage and treatment response of COVID-19. Several deep convolutional neural networks (DCNNs) have been designed for this task, whose performance, however, tends to be suppressed by their limited local receptive fields and insufficient global reasoning ability. In this paper, we propose a pixel-wise sparse graph reasoning (PSGR) module and insert it into a segmentation network to enhance the modeling of long-range dependencies for COVID-19 infected region segmentation in CT images. In the PSGR module, a graph is first constructed by projecting each pixel on a node based on the features produced by the segmentation backbone, and then converted into a sparsely-connected graph by keeping only K strongest connections to each uncertain pixel. The long-range information reasoning is performed on the sparsely-connected graph to generate enhanced features. The advantages of this module are two-fold: (1) the pixel-wise mapping strategy not only avoids imprecise pixel-to-node projections but also preserves the inherent information of each pixel for global reasoning; and (2) the sparsely-connected graph construction results in effective information retrieval and reduction of the noise propagation. The proposed solution has been evaluated against four widely-used segmentation models on three public datasets. The results show that the segmentation model equipped with our PSGR module can effectively segment COVID-19 infected regions in CT images, outperforming all other competing models.