Integration of Deep and Ensemble Learning for Detecting COVID-19 in Computed Tomography Images

Abstract This paper presents an approach for detecting covid-19 in Computed Tomography (CT) images by integrating deep convolutional neural networks and ensembles of decision trees. The proposed approach consisted of three steps. In the first step, the CT images slices were collected and processed. In the second step, a deep convolutional neural network was trained to predict covid-19 in the CT images. In the third step, deep features were extracted and were used to train an ensemble of decision trees. Six types/packages of ensembles of decision trees were investigated: extreme gradient boosting (XGBoost), bagged decision trees (BDT), random forest (RF), adaptive boosting decision trees (Adaboost), gradient boosting decision trees (GBDT), and dropouts meet multiple additive regression trees (DART). The accuracy, sensitivity, specificity, f1-score, precision, and area under the ROC curve (AUC) were calculated to compare the models against each other. The proposed approach revealed the highest performance with a RF that reported 0.87 accuracy, 0.87 f1-score, and 0.90 AUC. The developed models revealed similar performance when compared to previously published models. This highlights the efficiency of combining deep networks with ensembles of decision trees for detecting covid-19.