Classification of COVID-19 from CXR Images in a 15-class Scenario: an Attempt to Avoid Bias in the System
This addresses the need for emergency diagnosis of COVID-19 and other lung diseases using fast and cheap CXR imaging, but it is incremental as it builds on existing deep learning methods with a focus on bias reduction.
The study tackled the problem of detecting COVID-19 and other lung diseases from chest X-ray images by developing a system that classifies 15 diseases in a fair and unbiased manner, using a CXR selection technique to reduce dataset size and bias without compromising accuracy.
As of June 2021, the World Health Organization (WHO) has reported 171.7 million confirmed cases including 3,698,621 deaths from COVID-19. Detecting COVID-19 and other lung diseases from Chest X-Ray (CXR) images can be very effective for emergency diagnosis and treatment as CXR is fast and cheap. The objective of this study is to develop a system capable of detecting COVID-19 along with 14 other lung diseases from CXRs in a fair and unbiased manner. The proposed system consists of a CXR image selection technique and a deep learning based model to classify 15 diseases including COVID-19. The proposed CXR selection technique aims to retain the maximum variation uniformly and eliminate poor quality CXRs with the goal of reducing the training dataset size without compromising classifier accuracy. More importantly, it reduces the often hidden bias and unfairness in decision making. The proposed solution exhibits a promising COVID-19 detection scheme in a more realistic situation than most existing studies as it deals with 15 lung diseases together. We hope the proposed method will have wider adoption in medical image classification and other related fields.