An end-to-end framework for diagnosing COVID-19 pneumonia via Parallel Recursive MLP module and Bi-LTSM correlation

To fully extract the feature information of lung parenchyma in Chest X-ray (CXR) images and realize the auxiliary diagnosis of Corona Virus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) pneumonia, this paper proposed an end-to-end deep learning model, which is mainly composed of object detection, depth feature generation, and multi-channel fusion classification. Firstly, the convolutional neural network (CNN) and region proposal network (RPN)-based object detection module was adopted to detect chest cavity region of interest (ROI). Then, according to the obtained coordinate information of ROI and the convolution feature map of original image, the new convolution feature maps of ROI were obtained with number of 13. By screening 4 representative feature maps form 4 convolution layers with different receptive fields and combining with original ROI image, the 5-dimensional (5D) feature maps were generated as the multi-channel input of classification module. Moreover, in each channel of classification module, three pyramidal recursive multilayer perceptrons (RMLPs) were employed to achieve cross-scale and cross-channel feature analysis. Finally, the correlation analysis of multi-channel output was realized by bi-directional long short memory (Bi-LSTM) module, and the auxiliary diagnosis of pneumonia disease was realized through fully connected layer and SoftMax function. Experimental results show that the proposed model has better classification performance and diagnosis effect than previous methods, with great clinical application potential.