Multiscale Attention Guided Network for COVID-19 Detection Using Chest X-ray Images

Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) is one of the most destructive pandemic after millennium, forcing the world to tackle a health crisis. Automated classification of lung infections from chest X-ray (CXR) images strengthened traditional healthcare strategy to handle COVID-19. However, classifying COVID-19 from pneumonia cases using CXR image is challenging because of shared spatial characteristics, high feature variation in infections and contrast diversity between cases. Moreover, massive data collection is impractical for a newly emerged disease, which limited the performance of common deep learning models. To address this challenging topic, Multiscale Attention Guided deep network with Soft Distance regularization (MAG-SD) is proposed to automatically classify COVID-19 from pneumonia CXR images. In MAG-SD, MA-Net is used to produce prediction vector and attention map from multiscale feature maps. To relieve the shortage of training data, attention guided augmentations along with a soft distance regularization are posed, which requires a few labeled data to generate meaningful augmentations and reduce noise. Our multiscale attention model achieves better classification performance on our pneumonia CXR image dataset. Plentiful experiments are proposed for MAG-SD which demonstrates that it has its unique advantage in pneumonia classification over cuttingedge models. The code is available at https://github.com/ JasonLeeGHub/MAG-SD.