DenseCapsNet: Detection of COVID-19 from X-ray images using a capsule neural network

At present, the global pandemic as it relates to novel coronavirus pneumonia is still a very difficult situation. Due to the recent outbreak of novel coronavirus pneumonia, novel chest X-ray (CXR) images that can be used for deep learning analysis are very rare. To solve this problem, we propose a deep learning framework that integrates a convolutional neural network and a capsule network. DenseCapsNet, a new deep learning framework, is formed by the fusion of a dense convolutional network (DenseNet) and the capsule neural network (CapsNet), leveraging their respective advantages and reducing the dependence of convolutional neural networks on a large amount of data. Using 750 CXR images of lungs of healthy patients as well as those of patients with other pneumonia and novel coronavirus pneumonia, the method can obtain an accuracy of 90.7% and an F1 score of 90.9%, and the sensitivity for detecting COVID-19 can reach 96%. These results show that the deep fusion neural network DenseCapsNet has good performance in novel coronavirus pneumonia CXR radiography detection.