COVID-19 recognition from chest X-ray images by combining deep learning with transfer learning

Objective Based on the current research status, this paper proposes a deep learning model named Covid-DenseNet for COVID-19 detection from CXR (computed tomography) images, aiming to build a model with smaller computational complexity, stronger generalization ability, and excellent performance on benchmark datasets and other datasets with different sample distribution features and sample sizes.Methods The proposed model first extracts and obtains features of multiple scales from the input image through transfer learning, followed by assigning internal weights to the extracted features through the attention mechanism to enhance important features and suppress irrelevant features; finally, the model fuses these features of different scales through the multi-scale fusion architecture we designed to obtain richer semantic information and improve modeling efficiency.Results We evaluated our model and compared it with advanced models on three publicly available chest radiology datasets of different types, one of which is the baseline dataset, on which we constructed the model Covid-DenseNet, and the recognition accuracy on this test set was 96.89%, respectively. With recognition accuracy of 98.02% and 96.21% on the other two publicly available datasets, our model performs better than other advanced models. In addition, the performance of the model was further evaluated on external test sets, trained on data sets with balanced sample distribution (experiment 1) and unbalanced sample distribution (experiment 2), identified on the same external test set, and compared with DenseNet121. The recognition accuracy of the model in experiment 1 and experiment 2 is 80% and 77.5% respectively, which is 3.33% and 4.17% higher than that of DenseNet121 on external test set. On this basis, we also changed the number of samples in experiment 1 and experiment 2, and compared the impact of the change in the number of training set samples on the recognition accuracy of the model on the external test set. The results showed that when the number of samples increased and the sample features became more abundant, the trained Covid-DenseNet performed better on the external test set and the model became more robust.Conclusion Compared with other advanced models, our model has achieved better results on multiple datasets, and the recognition effect on external test sets is also quite good, with good generalization performance and robustness, and with the enrichment of sample features, the robustness of the model is further improved, and it has better clinical practice ability.