STCovidNet: Automatic Detection Model of Novel Coronavirus Pneumonia Based on Swin Transformer

The novel coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) has emerged as an enormous challenge facing China today. Preventive Medicine physicians and Artificial Intelligence (AI) researchers try to improve the ability to early automatic warning of coronavirus infections, promote epidemic prevention, and reduce medical costs using deep learning methods. In this work, we build an extensive database of chest computed tomography (CT) scans with image data from domestic and international open-source medical datasets. Swin Transformer is chosen as the backbone network to establish a model (STCovidNet) for the prediction of COVID-19. We then compare the performance of our technique against that of Vision Transformer (ViT) and Convolutional Neural Network (CNN). Next, to visualize our model's high-dimensional outputs in 2-dimensional space, we apply t-distributed stochastic neighbor embedding (t-SNE) as the dimension-reduction strategy. Finally, we employ gradient-weighted class activation mapping (Grad-CAM) to present a class activation map. The results indicate that STCovidNet’s performance surpasses ViT and CNN with a 0.9811 AUC and 0.9858 accuracy score. Our network outperforms previous techniques to reduce intra-class variability and generate well-separated feature embedding. The CAM figure illustrates that the decision region corresponds to radiologists' detecting spots. The suggested method can be an effective way of catching COVID-19 instances.