MEDNC: Multi-ensemble deep neural network for COVID-19 diagnosis (preprint)

Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) has spread all over the world for three years, but medical facilities in many areas still aren't adequate. There is a need for rapid COVID-19 diagnosis to identify high-risk patients and maximize the use of limited medical resources. Motivated by this fact, we proposed the deep learning framework MEDNC for automatic prediction and diagnosis of COVID-19 using computed tomography (CT) images. Our model was trained using two publicly available sets of COVID-19 data. And it was built with the inspiration of transfer learning. Results indicated that the MEDNC greatly enhanced the detection of COVID-19 infections, reaching an accuracy of 98.79% and 99.82% respectively. We tested MEDNC on a brain tumor and a blood cell dataset to show that our model applies to a wide range of problems. The outcomes demonstrated that our proposed models attained an accuracy of 99.39% and 99.28%, respectively. This COVID-19 recognition tool could help optimize healthcare resources and reduce clinicians' workload when screening for the virus.

ANC: Attention Network for COVID-19 Explainable Diagnosis Based on Convolutional Block Attention Module

Aim: To diagnose COVID-19 more efficiently and more correctly, this study proposed a novel attention network for COVID-19 (ANC). Methods: Two datasets were used in this study. An 18-way data augmentation was proposed to avoid overfitting. Then, convolutional block attention module (CBAM) was integrated to our model, the structure of which is fine-tuned. Finally, Grad-CAM was used to provide an explainable diagnosis. Results: The accuracy of our ANC methods on two datasets are 96.32% ± 1.06%, and 96.00% ± 1.03%, respectively. Conclusions: This proposed ANC method is superior to 9 state-of-the-art approaches.