S. Tabik

S. Tabik, A. Gómez-Ríos, J. L. Martín-Rodríguez et al.

Currently, Coronavirus disease (COVID-19), one of the most infectious diseases in the 21st century, is diagnosed using RT-PCR testing, CT scans and/or Chest X-Ray (CXR) images. CT (Computed Tomography) scanners and RT-PCR testing are not available in most medical centers and hence in many cases CXR images become the most time/cost effective tool for assisting clinicians in making decisions. Deep learning neural networks have a great potential for building COVID-19 triage systems and detecting COVID-19 patients, especially patients with low severity. Unfortunately, current databases do not allow building such systems as they are highly heterogeneous and biased towards severe cases. This paper is three-fold: (i) we demystify the high sensitivities achieved by most recent COVID-19 classification models, (ii) under a close collaboration with Hospital Universitario Clínico San Cecilio, Granada, Spain, we built COVIDGR-1.0, a homogeneous and balanced database that includes all levels of severity, from normal with Positive RT-PCR, Mild, Moderate to Severe. COVIDGR-1.0 contains 426 positive and 426 negative PA (PosteroAnterior) CXR views and (iii) we propose COVID Smart Data based Network (COVID-SDNet) methodology for improving the generalization capacity of COVID-classification models. Our approach reaches good and stable results with an accuracy of $97.72\% \pm 0.95 \%$, $86.90\% \pm 3.20\%$, $61.80\% \pm 5.49\%$ in severe, moderate and mild COVID-19 severity levels (Paper accepted for publication in Journal of Biomedical and Health Informatics). Our approach could help in the early detection of COVID-19. COVIDGR-1.0 along with the severity level labels are available to the scientific community through this link https://dasci.es/es/transferencia/open-data/covidgr/.

S. Tabik, R. F. Alvear-Sandoval, M. M. Ruiz et al.

Ensemble methods have been widely used for improving the results of the best single classificationmodel. A large body of works have achieved better performance mainly by applying one specific ensemble method. However, very few works have explored complex fusion schemes using het-erogeneous ensembles with new aggregation strategies. This paper is three-fold: 1) It provides an overview of the most popular ensemble methods, 2) analyzes several fusion schemes using MNIST as guiding thread and 3) introduces MNIST-NET10, a complex heterogeneous fusion architecture based on a degree of certainty aggregation approach; it combines two heterogeneous schemes from the perspective of data, model and fusion strategy. MNIST-NET10 reaches a new record in MNISTwith only 10 misclassified images. Our analysis shows that such complex heterogeneous fusionarchitectures based on the degree of certainty can be considered as a way of taking benefit fromdiversity.