MetaCOVID: A Siamese neural network framework with contrastive loss for n-shot diagnosis of COVID-19 patients

Various AI functionalities such as pattern recognition and prediction can effectively be used to diagnose (recognize) and predict coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) infections and propose timely response (remedial action) to minimize the spread and impact of the virus. Motivated by this, an AI system based on deep meta learning has been proposed in this research to accelerate analysis of chest X-ray (CXR) images in automatic detection of COVID-19 cases. We present a synergistic approach to integrate contrastive learning with a fine-tuned pre-trained ConvNet encoder to capture unbiased feature representations and leverage a Siamese network for final classification of COVID-19 cases. We validate the effectiveness of our proposed model using two publicly available datasets comprising images from normal, COVID-19 and other pneumonia infected categories. Our model achieves 95.6% accuracy and AUC of 0.97 in diagnosing COVID-19 from CXR images even with a limited number of training samples.