Medical imaging is playing a role in the fight against COVID-19, in some countries as a key tool, from the screening and diagnosis through the entire treatment procedure. The extraordinarily rapid spread of this pandemic has demonstrated that a new disease entity with a subset of relatively unique characteristics can pose a major new clinical challenge that requires new diagnostic tools in imaging. The AI/Deep Learning Imaging community has shown in many recent publications that rapidly developed AI-based automated CT and Xray image analysis tools can achieve high accuracy in detection of Coronavirus positive patients as well as quantifying the disease burden. The typical developmental cycle and large number of studies required to develop AI algorithms for various disease entities is much too long to respond effectively to produce these software tools on demand. This suggests the strong need to develop software more rapidly, perhaps using transfer learning from existing algorithms, to train on a relatively limited number of cases, and to train on multiple datasets in various locations that may not be able to be easily combined due to privacy and security issues.

Deep Learning for COVID Image Analysis provides a comprehensive overview of the most recently developed deep learning-based systems and solutions for COVID-19 image analysis, assembling a collection of state-of-the-art works for detection, severity analysis and predictive analysis, all of which are tools to support handling of the disease.