PSCNN: PatchShuffle Convolutional Neural Network for COVID-19 Explainable Diagnosis

Objective: COVID-19 is a sort of infectious disease caused by a new strain of coronavirus. This study aims to develop a more accurate COVID-19 diagnosis system. Methods: First, the n-conv module (nCM) is introduced. Then we built a 12-layer convolutional neural network (12l-CNN) as the backbone network. Afterwards, PatchShuffle was introduced to integrate with 12l-CNN as a regularization term of the loss function. Our model was named PSCNN. Moreover, multiple-way data augmentation and Grad-CAM are employed to avoid overfitting and locating lung lesions. Results: The mean and standard variation values of the seven measures of our model were 95.28 ± 1.03 (sensitivity), 95.78 ± 0.87 (specificity), 95.76 ± 0.86 (precision), 95.53 ± 0.83 (accuracy), 95.52 ± 0.83 (F1 score), 91.7 ± 1.65 (MCC), and 95.52 ± 0.83 (FMI). Conclusion: Our PSCNN is better than 10 state-of-the-art models. Further, we validate the optimal hyperparameters in our model and demonstrate the effectiveness of PatchShuffle.