COVID-19 Interpretable Diagnosis Algorithm Based on a Small Number of Chest X-Ray Samples

The COVID-19 medical diagnosis method based on individual’s chest X-ray (CXR) is achieved difficultly in the initial research, owing to difficulties in identifying CXR data of COVID-19 individuals. At the beginning of the study, infected individuals’ CXRs were scarce. The combination of artificial intelligence and medical diagnosis has been advanced and popular. To solve the difficulties, the interpretability analysis of AI model was used to explore the pathological characteristics of CXR samples infected with COVID-19 and assist medical diagnosis. The dataset was expanded by data augmentation to avoid overfitting. Transfer learning was used to test different pre-trained models and the unique output layers were designed to complete the model training with few samples. In this study, the output results of four pre-trained models were compared in three different output layers, and the results after data augmentation were compared with the results of the original dataset. The control variable method was used to conduct independent tests of 24 groups. Finally, 99.23% accuracy and 98% recall rate were obtained, and the visual results of CXR interpretability analysis were displayed. The network of COVID-19 interpretable diagnosis algorithm has the characteristics of high generalization and lightweight. It can be quickly applied to other urgent tasks with insufficient experimental data. At the same time, interpretability analysis brings new possibilities for medical diagnosis.