Segmentation and Evaluation of COVID-19 Lesion from CT scan Slices - A Study with Kapur/Otsu Function and Cuckoo Search Algorithm

Infection/disease in lung is one of the acute illnesses in humans. Pneumonia is one of the major lung diseases and each year; the death rate due to the untreated pneumonia is on rise globally. From December 2019; the pneumonia caused by the Coronavirus Disease (COVID-19) has emerged as a global threat due to its rapidity. The clinical level assessment of the COVID-19 is normally performed with the Computed-Tomography scan Slice (CTS) or the Chest X-ray. This research aims to propose an image processing system to examine the COVID-19 infection in CTS. This work implements Cuckoo-Search-Algorithm (CSA) monitored Kapur/Otsu image thresholding and a chosen image segmentation procedure to extract the pneumonia infection. After extracting the COVID-19 infection from the CTS, a relative assessment is then executed with the Ground-Truth-Image (GTI) offered by a radiologist and the essential performance measures are then computed to confirm the superiority of the proposed technique. This work also presents a comparative assessment among the segmentation procedures, such as Level-Set (LS) and Chan-Vese (CV) methods. The experimental outcome authenticates that, the results by Kapur and Otsu threshold are approximately similar when the LS is implemented and the CV with the Otsu presents better values of Jaccard, Dice and Accuracy compared to other methods presented in this research.