Detection of COVID-19 With CT Images Using Hybrid Complex Shearlet Scattering Networks

With the ongoing worldwide coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic, it is desirable to develop effective algorithms to automatically detect COVID-19 with chest computed tomography (CT) images. Recently, a considerable number of methods based on deep learning have indeed been proposed. However, training an accurate deep learning model requires a large-scale chest CT dataset, which is hard to collect due to the high contagiousness of COVID-19. To achieve improved detection performance, this paper proposes a hybrid framework that fuses the complex shearlet scattering transform (CSST) and a suitable convolutional neural network into a single model. The introduced CSST cascades complex shearlet transforms with modulus nonlinearities and low-pass filter convolutions to compute a sparse and locally invariant image representation. The features computed from the input chest CT images are discriminative for COVID-19 detection. Furthermore, a wide residual network with a redesigned residual block (WR2N) is developed to learn more granular multiscale representations by applying it to scattering features. The combination of model-based CSST and data-driven WR2N leads to a more convenient neural network for image representation, where the idea is to learn only the image parts that the CSST cannot handle instead of all parts. Experiments on two public datasets demonstrate the superiority of our method. We can obtain more accurate results than several state-of-the-art COVID-19 classification methods in terms of measures such as accuracy, the F1-score, and the area under the receiver operating characteristic curve.