Cn2a-capsnet: a capsule network and CNN-attention based method for COVID-19 chest X-ray image diagnosis

Due to its high infectivity, COVID-19 has rapidly spread worldwide, emerging as one of the most severe and urgent diseases faced by the global community in recent years. Currently, deep learning-based diagnostic methods can automatically detect COVID-19 cases from chest X-ray images. However, these methods often rely on large-scale labeled datasets. To address this limitation, we propose a novel neural network model called CN2A-CapsNet, aiming to enhance the automatic diagnosis of COVID-19 in chest X-ray images through efficient feature extraction techniques. Specifically, we combine CNN with an attention mechanism to form the CN2A model, which efficiently mines relevant information from chest X-ray images. Additionally, we incorporate capsule networks to leverage their ability to understand spatial information, ultimately achieving efficient feature extraction. Through validation on a publicly available chest X-ray image dataset, our model achieved a 98.54% accuracy and a 99.01% recall rate in the binary classification task (COVID-19/Normal) on a six-fold cross-validation dataset. In the three-class classification task (COVID-19/Pneumonia/Normal), it attained a 96.71% accuracy and a 98.34% recall rate. Compared to the previous state-of-the-art models, CN2A-CapsNet exhibits notable advantages in diagnosing COVID-19 cases, specifically achieving a high recall rate even with small-scale datasets.