RCoNet: Deformable Mutual Information Maximization and High-Order Uncertainty-Aware Learning for Robust COVID-19 Detection

The novel 2019 Coronavirus (COVID-19) infection has spread worldwide and is currently a major healthcare challenge around the world. Chest computed tomography (CT) and X-ray images have been well recognized to be two effective techniques for clinical COVID-19 disease diagnoses. Due to faster imaging time and considerably lower cost than CT, detecting COVID-19 in chest X-ray (CXR) images is preferred for efficient diagnosis, assessment, and treatment. However, considering the similarity between COVID-19 and pneumonia, CXR samples with deep features distributed near category boundaries are easily misclassified by the hyperplanes learned from limited training data. Moreover, most existing approaches for COVID-19 detection focus on the accuracy of prediction and overlook uncertainty estimation, which is particularly important when dealing with noisy datasets. To alleviate these concerns, we propose a novel deep network named RCoNetks for robust COVID-19 detection which employs Deformable Mutual Information Maximization (DeIM), Mixed High-order Moment Feature (MHMF), and Multiexpert Uncertainty-aware Learning (MUL). With DeIM, the mutual information (MI) between input data and the corresponding latent representations can be well estimated and maximized to capture compact and disentangled representational characteristics. Meanwhile, MHMF can fully explore the benefits of using high-order statistics and extract discriminative features of complex distributions in medical imaging. Finally, MUL creates multiple parallel dropout networks for each CXR image to evaluate uncertainty and thus prevent performance degradation caused by the noise in the data. The experimental results show that RCoNet(s)(k) achieves the state-of-the-art performance on an open-source COVIDx dataset of 15 134 original CXR images across several metrics. Crucially, our method is shown to be more effective than existing methods with the presence of noise in the data.