AVNC: Attention-based VGG-style network for COVID-19 diagnosis by CBAM

(Aim) To detect COVID-19 patients more accurately and more precisely, we proposed a novel artificial intelligence model. (Methods) We used previously proposed chest CT dataset containing four categories: COVID-19, community-acquired pneumonia, secondary pulmonary tuberculosis, and healthy subjects. First, we proposed a novel VGG-style base network (VSBN) as backbone network. Second, convolutional block attention module (CBAM) was introduced as attention module into our VSBN. Third, an improved multiple-way data augmentation method was used to resist overfitting of our AI model. In all, our model was dubbed as a 12-layer attention-based VGG-style network for COVID-19 (AVNC) (Results) This proposed AVNC achieved the sensitivity/precision/F1 per class all above 95%. Particularly, AVNC yielded a micro-averaged F1 score of 96.87%, which is higher than 11 state-of-the-art approaches. (Conclusion) This proposed AVNC is effective in recognizing COVID-19 diseases.