Multilevel Deep-Aggregated Boosted Network to Recognize COVID-19 Infection from Large-Scale Heterogeneous Radiographic Data

IEEE J Biomed Health Inform. 2021 Jun;25(6):1881-1891. doi: 10.1109/JBHI.2021.3072076. Epub 2021 Jun 3.

Abstract

In the present epidemic of the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19), radiological imaging modalities, such as X-ray and computed tomography (CT), have been identified as effective diagnostic tools. However, the subjective assessment of radiographic examination is a time-consuming task and demands expert radiologists. Recent advancements in artificial intelligence have enhanced the diagnostic power of computer-aided diagnosis (CAD) tools and assisted medical specialists in making efficient diagnostic decisions. In this work, we propose an optimal multilevel deep-aggregated boosted network to recognize COVID-19 infection from heterogeneous radiographic data, including X-ray and CT images. Our method leverages multilevel deep-aggregated features and multistage training via a mutually beneficial approach to maximize the overall CAD performance. To improve the interpretation of CAD predictions, these multilevel deep features are visualized as additional outputs that can assist radiologists in validating the CAD results. A total of six publicly available datasets were fused to build a single large-scale heterogeneous radiographic collection that was used to analyze the performance of the proposed technique and other baseline methods. To preserve generality of our method, we selected different patient data for training, validation, and testing, and consequently, the data of same patient were not included in training, validation, and testing subsets. In addition, fivefold cross-validation was performed in all the experiments for a fair evaluation. Our method exhibits promising performance values of 95.38%, 95.57%, 92.53%, 98.14%, 93.16%, and 98.55% in terms of average accuracy, F-measure, specificity, sensitivity, precision, and area under the curve, respectively and outperforms various state-of-the-art methods.

Publication types

  • Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

  • COVID-19 / diagnostic imaging*
  • COVID-19 / virology
  • Deep Learning*
  • Diagnosis, Computer-Assisted / methods
  • Humans
  • Neural Networks, Computer
  • SARS-CoV-2 / isolation & purification
  • Tomography, X-Ray Computed / methods

Grants and funding

This work was supported in part by the National Research Foundation of Korea (NRF) funded by the Ministry of Science and ICT (MSIT) through the Basic Science Research Program (NRF-2020R1A2C1006179), in part by the MSIT, Korea, under the ITRC (Information Technology Research Center) Support Program (IITP-2021-2020-0-01789) supervised by the IITP (Institute for Information & Communications Technology Planning & Evaluation), and in part by the NRF funded by the MSIT through the Basic Science Research Program (NRF-2019R1A2C1083813).