Detection of Diseases in Pandemic: A Predictive Approach Using Stack Ensembling on Multi-Modal Imaging Data

Abstract

Deep Learning (DL) in Medical Imaging is an emerging technology for diagnosing various diseases, i.e., pneumonia, lung cancer, brain stroke, breast cancer, etc. In Machine Learning (ML) and traditional data mining approaches, feature extraction is performed before building a predictive model, which is a cumbersome task. In the case of complex data, there are a lot of challenges, such as insufficient domain knowledge while performing feature engineering. With the advancement in the application of Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs) and DL, ensemble learning is an essential foundation for developing an automated diagnostic system. Medical Imaging with different modalities is effective for the detailed analysis of various chronic diseases, in which the healthy and infected scans of multiple organs are compared and analyzed. In this study, the transfer learning approach is applied to train 15 state-of-the-art DL models on three datasets (X-ray, CT-scan and Ultrasound) for predicting diseases. The performance of these models is evaluated and compared. Furthermore, a two-level stack ensembling of fine-tuned DL models is proposed. The DL models having the best performances among the 15 will be used for stacking in the first layer. Support Vector Machine (SVM) is used in Level 2 as a meta-classifier to predict the result as one of the following: pandemic positive (1) or negative (0). The proposed architecture has achieved 98.3%, 98.2% and 99% accuracy for D1, D2 and D3, respectively, which outperforms the performance of existing research. These experimental results and findings can be considered helpful tools for pandemic screening on chest X-rays, CT scan images and ultrasound images of infected patients. This architecture aims to provide clinicians with more accurate results.