Automated Lung-Related Pneumonia and COVID-19 Detection Based on Novel Feature Extraction Framework and Vision Transformer Approaches Using Chest X-ray Images

Bioengineering (Basel). 2022 Nov 18;9(11):709. doi: 10.3390/bioengineering9110709.

Abstract

According to research, classifiers and detectors are less accurate when images are blurry, have low contrast, or have other flaws which raise questions about the machine learning model's ability to recognize items effectively. The chest X-ray image has proven to be the preferred image modality for medical imaging as it contains more information about a patient. Its interpretation is quite difficult, nevertheless. The goal of this research is to construct a reliable deep-learning model capable of producing high classification accuracy on chest x-ray images for lung diseases. To enable a thorough study of the chest X-ray image, the suggested framework first derived richer features using an ensemble technique, then a global second-order pooling is applied to further derive higher global features of the images. Furthermore, the images are then separated into patches and position embedding before analyzing the patches individually via a vision transformer approach. The proposed model yielded 96.01% sensitivity, 96.20% precision, and 98.00% accuracy for the COVID-19 Radiography Dataset while achieving 97.84% accuracy, 96.76% sensitivity and 96.80% precision, for the Covid-ChestX-ray-15k dataset. The experimental findings reveal that the presented models outperform traditional deep learning models and other state-of-the-art approaches provided in the literature.

Keywords: COVID-19; artificial intelligence; automatic detection; chest X-rays images; epidemic; feature extraction; lung disease; pneumonia.

Grants and funding

This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (U2001207 and 61872248), Guangdong NSF (2017A030312008), Shenzhen Science and Technology Foundation (ZDSYS20190902092853047 and R2020A045), the Project of DEGP (2019KCXTD005), the Guangdong “Pearl River Talent Recruitment Program” (2019ZT08X603), and the Science and Technology Department of Sichuan Province (2021YFG0322).