Detecting COVID-19 in Chest X-Ray Images via MCFF-Net

COVID-19 is a respiratory disease caused by severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2). Due to the rapid spread of COVID-19 around the world, the number of COVID-19 cases continues to increase, and lots of countries are facing tremendous pressure on both public and medical resources. Although RT-PCR is the most widely used detection technology with COVID-19 detection, it still has some limitations, such as high cost, being time-consuming, and having low sensitivity. According to the characteristics of chest X-ray (CXR) images, we design the Parallel Channel Attention Feature Fusion Module (PCAF), as well as a new structure of convolutional neural network MCFF-Net proposed based on PCAF. In order to improve the recognition efficiency, the network adopts 3 classifiers: 1-FC, GAP-FC, and Conv1-GAP. The experimental results show that the overall accuracy of MCFF-Net66-Conv1-GAP model is 94.66% for 4-class classification. Simultaneously, the classification accuracy, precision, sensitivity, specificity, and F1-score of COVID-19 are 100%. MCFF-Net may not only assist clinicians in making appropriate decisions for COVID-19 diagnosis but also mitigate the lack of testing kits.