TDA-Net: Fusion of Persistent Homology and Deep Learning Features for COVID-19 Detection From Chest X-Ray Images

Topological Data Analysis (TDA) has emerged recently as a robust tool to extract and compare the structure of datasets. TDA identifies features in data (e.g., connected components and holes) and assigns a quantitative measure to these features. Several studies reported that topological features extracted by TDA tools provide unique information about the data, discover new insights, and determine which feature is more related to the outcome. On the other hand, the overwhelming success of deep neural networks in learning patterns and relationships has been proven on various data applications including images. To capture the characteristics of both worlds, we propose TDA-Net, a novel ensemble network that fuses topological and deep features for the purpose of enhancing model generalizability and accuracy. We apply the proposed TDA-Net to a critical application, which is the automated detection of COVID-19 from CXR images. Experimental results showed that the proposed network achieved excellent performance and suggested the applicability of our method in practice.