WE-Net: An Ensemble Deep Learning Model for Covid-19 Detection in Chest X-ray Images Using Segmentation and Classification

Amidst the increasing surge of Covid-19 infections worldwide, chest X-ray (CXR) imaging data have been found incredibly helpful for the fast screening of COVID-19 patients. This has been particularly helpful in resolving the overcapacity situation in the urgent care center and emergency department. An accurate Covid-19 detection algorithm can further aid this effort to reduce the disease burden. As part of this study, we put forward WE-Net, an ensemble deep learning (DL) framework for detecting pulmonary manifestations of COVID-19 from CXRs. We incorporated lung segmentation using U-Net to identify the thoracic Region of Interest (RoI), which was further utilized to train DL models to learn from relevant features. ImageNet based pre-trained DL models were fine-tuned, trained, and evaluated on the publicly available CXR collections. Ensemble methods like stacked generalization, voting, averaging, and the weighted average were used to combine predictions from best-performing models. The purpose of incorporating ensemble techniques is to overcome some of the challenges, such as generalization errors encountered due to noise and training on a small number of data sets. Experimental evaluations concluded on significant improvement in performance using the deep fusion neural network, i.e., the WE-Net model, which led to 99.02% accuracy and 0.989 area under the curve (AUC) in detecting COVID-19 from CXRs. The combined use of image segmentation, pre-trained DL models, and ensemble learning (EL) boosted the prediction results.