Recognizing and detecting COVID-19 in chest X-ray images using constrained multi-view spectral clustering

Abstract

AbstractMachine learning, particularly classification algorithms, has been widely employed for diagnosing COVID-19 cases. However, these methods typically rely on labeled datasets and analyze a single data view. With the vast amount of patient data available without labels, this paper addresses the novel challenge of unsupervised COVID-19 diagnosis. The goal is to harness the abundant data without labels effectively. In recent times, multi-view clustering has garnered considerable attention in the research community. Spectral clustering, known for its robust theoretical framework, is a key focus. However, traditional spectral clustering methods generate only nonlinear data projections, necessitating additional clustering steps. The quality of these post-processing steps can be influenced by various factors, such as initialization procedures and outliers. This paper introduces an enhanced version of the recent “Multiview Spectral Clustering via integrating Nonnegative Embedding and Spectral Embedding” method. While retaining the benefits of the original technique, the proposed model integrates two essential constraints: (1) a constraint for ensuring the consistent smoothness of the nonnegative embedding across all views and (2) an orthogonality constraint imposed on the columns of the nonnegative embedding matrix. The effectiveness of this approach is demonstrated using COVIDx datasets. Additionally, the method is evaluated on other image datasets to validate its suitability for this study.