COVID-ResNet: COVID-19 Recognition Based on Improved Attention ResNet

Abstract

COVID-19 is the most widespread infectious disease in the world. There is an incubation period in the early stage of infection. At present, there are some difficulties in the diagnosis of COVID-19. Medical image analysis based on computed tomography (CT) images is an important tool for clinical diagnosis. However, the lesion size of COVID-19 is smaller, and the lesion shape of COVID-19 is more complex. The effect of the aided diagnosis model is not good. To solve this problem, an aided diagnostic model of COVID-ResNet was proposed based on CT images. Firstly, an improved attention ResNet model was designed based on CT images to focus on the focal lesion area. Secondly, the SE-Res block was constructed. The squeeze excitation mechanism with the residual connection was introduced into the ResNet. The SE-Res block can enhance the correlation degree among different channels and improve the overall accuracy of the model. Thirdly, MFCA (multi-layer feature converge attention) blocks were proposed, which extract multi-layer features. In this model, coordinated attention was used to focus on the direction information of the lesion area. Different layer features were concatenated so that the shallow layer and deep layer features were fused. The experimental results showed that the model could significantly improve the recognition accuracy of COVID-19. Compared with similar models, COVID-ResNet has better performance. On the COVID-19 CT dataset, the accuracy, recall rate, F1 score, and AUC value could reach 96.89%, 98.15%,96.96%, and 99.04%, respectively. Compared with the ResNet model, the accuracy, recall rate, F1 score, and AUC value were higher by 3.1%, 2.46%, 3.0%, and 1.16%, respectively. In ablation experiments, the experimental results showed that the SE-Res block and MFCA model proposed by us were effective. COVID-ResNet transfers the shallow features to the deep, gathers the features, and makes the information complementary. COVID-ResNet can improve the work efficiency of doctors and reduce the misdiagnosis rate. It has a positive significance for the computer-aided diagnosis of COVID-19.