Complex network-based classification of radiographic images for COVID-19 diagnosis

In this work, we present a network-based technique for chest X-ray image classification to help the diagnosis and prognosis of patients with COVID-19. From visual inspection, we perceive that healthy and COVID-19 chest radiographic images present different levels of geometric complexity. Therefore, we apply fractal dimension and quadtree as feature extractors to characterize such differences. Moreover, real-world datasets often present complex patterns, which are hardly handled by only the physical features of the data (such as similarity, distance, or distribution). This issue is addressed by complex networks, which are suitable tools for characterizing data patterns and capturing spatial, topological, and functional relationships in data. Specifically, we propose a new approach combining complexity measures and complex networks to provide a modified high-level classification technique to be applied to COVID-19 chest radiographic image classification. The computational results on the Kaggle COVID-19 Radiography Database show that the proposed method can obtain high classification accuracy on X-ray images, being competitive with state-of-the-art classification techniques. Lastly, a set of network measures is evaluated according to their potential in distinguishing the network classes, which resulted in the choice of communicability measure. We expect that the present work will make significant contributions to machine learning at the semantic level and to combat COVID-19.