Pneumonia detection with QCSA network on chest X-ray

Worldwide, pneumonia is the leading cause of infant mortality. Experienced radiologists use chest X-rays to diagnose pneumonia and other respiratory diseases. The diagnostic procedure's complexity causes radiologists to disagree with the decision. Early diagnosis is the only feasible strategy for mitigating the disease's impact on the patent. Computer-aided diagnostics improve the accuracy of diagnosis. Recent studies established that Quaternion neural networks classify and predict better than real-valued neural networks, especially when dealing with multi-dimensional or multi-channel input. The attention mechanism has been derived from the human brain's visual and cognitive ability in which it focuses on some portion of the image and ignores the rest portion of the image. The attention mechanism maximizes the usage of the image's relevant aspects, hence boosting classification accuracy. In the current work, we propose a QCSA network (Quaternion Channel-Spatial Attention Network) by combining the spatial and channel attention mechanism with Quaternion residual network to classify chest X-Ray images for Pneumonia detection. We used a Kaggle X-ray dataset. The suggested architecture achieved 94.53% accuracy and 0.89 AUC. We have also shown that performance improves by integrating the attention mechanism in QCNN. Our results indicate that our approach to detecting pneumonia is promising.