Development of a quantitative segmentation model to assess the effect of comorbidity on patients with COVID-19

The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) has brought a global disaster. Quantitative lesions may provide the radiological evidence of the severity of pneumonia and further to assess the effect of comorbidity on patients with COVID-19. 294 patients with COVID-19 were enrolled from February, 24, 2020 to June, 1, 2020 from six centers. Multi-task Unet network was used to segment the whole lung and lesions from chest CT images. This deep learning method was pre-trained in 650 CT images (550 in primary dataset and 100 in test dataset) with COVID-19 or community-acquired pneumonia and Dice coefficients in test dataset were calculated. 50 CT scans of 50 patients (15 with comorbidity and 35 without comorbidity) were random selected to mark lesions manually. The results will be compared with the automatic segmentation model. Eight quantitative parameters were calculated based on the segmentation results to evaluate the effect of comorbidity on patients with COVID-19. Quantitative segmentation model was proved to be effective and accurate with all Dice coefficients more than 0.85 and all accuracies more than 0.95. Of the 294 patients, 52 (17.7%) patients were reported having at least one comorbidity; 14 (4.8%) having more than one comorbidity. Patients with any comorbidity were older (P