To differentiate coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pneumonia from other types of pneumonia, expert radiologists must analyze the chest x-ray (CXR) to identify visual, radiographic patterns associated with Severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) infection. It is challenging because the findings are similar for different types of pneumonia.~Since the manual diagnosis of COVID-19 from CXR is a difficult and time-consuming process, applying deep learning (DL) models to medical image analysis is a current hot research topic. This work will develop a new Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) to detect COVID-19 radiographs. It will use a large dataset of chest radiographs classified into three classes: viral/bacterial pneumonia, COVID-19 pneumonia, and normal images. The study aims to incorporate a new attention module that applies CNNs to the linear projection operation to help differentiate COVID-19 pneumonia from other pneumonia and normal chest radiographs in clinical practice.
This study aims to design a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) and apply an attention model to help differentiate pneumonia due to Severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), pneumonia due to other viruses/bacteria, and normal chest x-ray (CXR) in clinical practice. A bank of digital chest images from a high-complexity health facility in Cali, Colombia, was used.