Deep learning-based multi-class COVID-19 classification with x-ray images

Zong Fan, Shenghua He, Su Ruan, Xiaowei Wang, Hua Li

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contributionpeer-review

6 Scopus citations

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic continues spreading rapidly around the world and has caused devastating outcomes towards the health of the global population. The reverse transcription-polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR) test, as the only current gold standard for screening infected cases, yields a relatively high false positive rate and low sensitivity on asymptomatic subjects. The use of chest X-ray radiography (CXR) images coupled with deep- learning (DL) methods for image classification, represents an attractive adjunct to or replacement for RT-PCR testing. However, its usage has been widely debated over the past few months and its potential effectiveness remains unclear. A number of DL-based methods have been proposed to classify the COVID-19 cases from the normal ones, achieving satisfying high performance. However, these methods show limited performance on the multi-class classification task for COVID-19, pneumonia and normal cases, mainly due to two factors: 1) the textures in COVID-19 CXR images are extremely similar to that of pneumonia cases, and 2) there are much fewer COVID-19 cases compared to the other two classes in the public domain. To address these challenges, a novel framework is proposed to learn a deep convolutional neural network (DCNN) model for accurately classifying COVID-19 and pneumonia cases from other normal cases by the use of CXR images. In addition to training the model by use of conventional classification loss which measures classification accuracy, the proposed method innovatively employs a reconstruction loss measuring image fidelity and an adversarial loss measuring class distribution fidelity to assist in the training of the main DCNN model to extract more informative features to support multi-class classification. The experiment results on a COVID-19 dataset demonstrate the superior classification performance of the proposed method in terms of accuracy compared to other existing DL-based methods. The experiment on another cancer dataset further implies the potential of applying the proposed methods in other medical imaging applications.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationMedical Imaging 2021
Subtitle of host publicationImage-Guided Procedures, Robotic Interventions, and Modeling
EditorsCristian A. Linte, Jeffrey H. Siewerdsen
PublisherSPIE
ISBN (Electronic)9781510640252
DOIs
StatePublished - 2021
EventMedical Imaging 2021: Image-Guided Procedures, Robotic Interventions, and Modeling - Virtual, Online
Duration: Feb 15 2021Feb 19 2021

Publication series

NameProgress in Biomedical Optics and Imaging - Proceedings of SPIE
Volume11598
ISSN (Print)1605-7422

Conference

ConferenceMedical Imaging 2021: Image-Guided Procedures, Robotic Interventions, and Modeling
CityVirtual, Online
Period02/15/2102/19/21

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