COVID-WideNet—A capsule network for COVID-19 detection

Ever since the outbreak of COVID-19, the entire world is grappling with panic over its rapid spread. Consequently, it is of utmost importance to detect its presence. Timely diagnostic testing leads to the quick identification, treatment and isolation of infected people. A number of deep learning classifiers have been proved to provide encouraging results with higher accuracy as compared to the conventional method of RT-PCR testing. Chest radiography, particularly for using X-ray images, is a prime imaging modality for detecting the suspected COVID-19 patients. However, the performance of these approaches still needs to be improved. In this paper, we propose a capsule network called COVID-WideNet for diagnosing COVID-19 cases using Chest X-ray (CXR) images. Experimental results have demonstrated that a discriminative trained, multi-layer capsule network achieves state-of-the-art performance on the COVIDx dataset. In particular, COVID-WideNet performs better than any other CNN based approaches for the diagnosis of COVID-19 infected patients. Further, the proposed COVID-WideNet has the number of trainable parameters that is 20 times less than that of other CNN based models. This results in a fast and efficient diagnosing COVID-19 symptoms, and with achieving the 0.95 of Area Under Curve (AUC), 91% of accuracy, sensitivity and specificity, respectively. This may also assist radiologists to detect COVID and its variant like delta.