  Pneumonia is one of the foremost lung diseases and untreated pneumonia will
lead to serious threats for all age groups. The proposed work aims to extract
and evaluate the Coronavirus disease (COVID-19) caused pneumonia infection in
lung using CT scans. We propose an image-assisted system to extract COVID-19
infected sections from lung CT scans (coronal view). It includes following
steps: (i) Threshold filter to extract the lung region by eliminating possible
artifacts; (ii) Image enhancement using Harmony-Search-Optimization and Otsu
thresholding; (iii) Image segmentation to extract infected region(s); and (iv)
Region-of-interest (ROI) extraction (features) from binary image to compute
level of severity. The features that are extracted from ROI are then employed
to identify the pixel ratio between the lung and infection sections to identify
infection level of severity. The primary objective of the tool is to assist the
pulmonologist not only to detect but also to help plan treatment process. As a
consequence, for mass screening processing, it will help prevent diagnostic
burden.
