Reducing radiation dose for NN-based COVID-19 detection in helical chest CT using real-time monitored reconstruction

Computed tomography is a powerful tool for medical examination, which plays a particularly important role in the investigation of acute diseases, such as COVID-19. A growing concern in relation to CT scans is the radiation to which the patients are exposed, and a lot of research is dedicated to methods and approaches to how to reduce the radiation dose in X-ray CT studies. In this paper, we propose a novel scanning protocol based on real-time monitored reconstruction for a helical chest CT using a pre-trained neural network model for COVID-19 detection as an expert. In a simulated study, for the first time, we proposed using per-slice stopping rules based on the COVID-19 detection neural network output to reduce the frequency of projection acquisition for portions of the scanning process. The proposed method allows reducing the total number of X-ray projections necessary for COVID-19 detection, and thus reducing the radiation dose, without a significant decrease in the prediction accuracy. The proposed protocol was evaluated on 163 patients from the COVID-CTset dataset, providing a mean dose reduction of 15.1% while the mean decrease in prediction accuracy amounted to only 1.9% achieving a Pareto improvement over a fixed protocol. •We aim to reduce X-ray dose using problem-oriented (COVID-19 diagnosis) approach.•Monitoring tomography reconstruction (MTR) treats CT as an anytime algorithm.•The proposed protocol is the first attempt to apply MTR to helical CT geometry.•A pre-trained COVID-19 detection NN was used as an “expert” within MTR protocol.•MTR achieves dose reduction of 14.2% for only 2.4% decrease in prediction quality.