Multi-Lane Capsule Network Architecture for Detection of COVID-19

The COVID-19 pandemic in the world has given rise to a lot of research done in the field of medical imaging using deep learning and artificial intelligence methods for the detection and prognosis of the disease. Capsule Networks (CapsNet) perform image classification by identifying the spatial location and orientation of features within the images. In this paper, a Multi-lane Capsule Neural Networks (MLCN) model is introduced that performs dynamic routing networks with dimensionally distinct parallel lanes, replacing the traditional pooling operations in Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN). With the use of parallel capsules, feature orientation identification at any given part of the image is improved. The MLCN model has been studied in this paper using the X-ray images collected from patients tested for COVID-19 and its performance is evaluated using a number of metrics. It has been observed that the performance of the constructed CapsNet model achieved a testing accuracy of 96.8% with the F-1 score 97.19% performing better than the existing state-of-the-art models.