The pandemic of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) is spreading all over the world. Medical imaging such as X-ray and computed tomography (CT) plays an essential role in the global fight against COVID-19, whereas the recently emerging artificial intelligence (AI) technologies further strengthen the power of the imaging tools and help medical specialists. We hereby review the rapid responses in the community of medical imaging (empowered by AI) toward COVID-19. For example, AI-empowered image acquisition can significantly help automate the scanning procedure and also reshape the workflow with minimal contact to patients, providing the best protection to the imaging technicians. Also, AI can improve work efficiency by accurate delination of infections in X-ray and CT images, facilitating subsequent quantification. Moreover, the computer-aided platforms help radiologists make clinical decisions, i.e., for disease diagnosis, tracking, and prognosis. In this review paper, we thus cover the entire pipeline of medical imaging and analysis techniques involved with COVID-19, including image acquisition, segmentation, diagnosis, and follow-up.We particularly focus on the integration of AI with X-ray and CT, both of which are widely used in the frontline hospitals, in order to depict the latest progress of medical imaging and radiology fighting against COVID-19.

Accurate segmentation of the prostate and organs at risk (e.g., bladder and rectum) in CT images is a crucial step for radiation therapy in the treatment of prostate cancer. However, it is a very challenging task due to unclear boundaries, large intra-and inter-patient shape variability, and uncertain existence of bowel gases and fiducial markers. In this paper, we propose a novel automatic segmentation framework using fully convolutional networks with boundary sensitive representation to address this challenging problem. Our novel segmentation framework contains three modules. First, an organ localization model is designed to focus on the candidate segmentation region of each organ for better performance. Then, a boundary sensitive representation model based on multi-task learning is proposed to represent the semantic boundary information in a more robust and accurate manner. Finally, a multi-label cross-entropy loss function combining boundary sensitive representation is introduced to train a fully convolutional network for the organ segmentation. The proposed method is evaluated on a large and diverse planning CT dataset with 313 images from 313 prostate cancer patients. Experimental results show that the performance of our proposed method outperforms the baseline fully convolutional networks, as well as other state-of-the-art methods in CT male pelvic organ segmentation.

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