Congratulations! Dr. Dong was awarded with Faculty RISE-Graduate Research Award from Division of Research & Innovation, Prairie View A&M University, for his study, “Deep Learning for COVID-19 Image Classification and Segmentation”. The Faculty-RISE Graduate Research award amount of $10,000 is for the duration of the academic year 2020-2021 Fall/Spring semesters. Funds can be used for graduate student’s salaries and/or tuition, $5,000 per semester. Dr. Dong’s current PhD student, Lucy Nwuso, will be funded by this award.

Principal Investigator (PI): Dong, Xishuang, Assistant Professor, Department of Electronic and Computer Engineering, Roy G. Perry College of Engineering, Office Phone: (936)261-9865.

Project Summary: Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) is an ongoing global pandemic in over 200 countries and territories. It is imperative to develop a complementary tool that is able to provide lung-imaging informa- tion to help medical staff improve diagnosis of COVID-19. Chest X-ray and thoracic CT are easily accessible imaging equipment, which provides huge assistance to clinicians for the diagnosis of lung diseases. Moreover, imaging findings play a critical role in constraining the viral transmission and also fighting against COVID-19. The objective of this project is to develop deep learning models that are capable of implementing classification and segmentation of COVID-19 pathology on medical images through building semi-supervised deep learning models. Specifically, the models can complete COVID-19 classification and segmentation using a huge amount of medical images without annotations, which significantly reduces the cost of labeling images to build high- performance models.