Deep feature fusion classification network (DFFCNet): Towards accurate diagnosis of COVID-19 using chest X-rays images

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.bspc.2022.103677Get rights and content

Highlights

  • We used four multiple-way data augmentation (MDA) ways to enhance the training set.

  • EfficientNetV2 was introduced as the backbone network to fuse with the features extracted by ResNet101.

  • The spatial attention (SA) module and the channel attention (CA) module are introduced into the network.

  • SVM classifier was used to improve the diagnostic accuracy of patients infected with COVID-19.

  • To simplify the interpretation of proposed deep learning model, a color visualization approach is employed via the Grad-CAM++ technique.

Abstract

The widespread of highly infectious disease, i.e., COVID-19, raises serious concerns regarding public health, and poses significant threats to the economy and society. In this study, an efficient method based on deep learning, deep feature fusion classification network (DFFCNet), is proposed to improve the overall diagnosis accuracy of the disease. The method is divided into two modules, deep feature fusion module (DFFM) and multi-disease classification module (MDCM). DFFM combines the advantages of different networks for feature fusion and MDCM uses support vector machine (SVM) as a classifier to improve the classification performance. Meanwhile, the spatial attention (SA) module and the channel attention (CA) module are introduced into the network to improve the feature extraction capability of the network. In addition, the multiple-way data augmentation (MDA) is performed on the images of chest X-ray images (CXRs), to improve the diversity of samples. Similarly, the utilized Grad-CAM++ is to make the features more intuitive, and the deep learning model more interpretable. On testing of a collection of publicly available datasets, results from experimentation reveal that the proposed method achieves 99.89% accuracy in a triple classification of COVID-19, pneumonia, and health X-ray images, there by outperforming the eight state-of-the-art classification techniques.

Keywords

COVID-19
Deep learning
Classification
Feature fusion
SVM

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