Thorax Disease Classification Based on Pyramidal Convolution Shuffle Attention Neural Network

Abstract

Chest X-ray is one of the most common radiological examinations for screening thoracic diseases. Despite the existing methods based on convolution neural network that have achieved remarkable progress in thoracic disease classification from chest X-ray images, the scale variation of the pathological abnormalities in different thoracic diseases is still challenging in chest X-ray image classification. Based on the above problems, this paper proposes a residual network model based on a pyramidal convolution module and shuffle attention module (PCSANet). Specifically, the pyramid convolution is used to extract more discriminative features of pathological abnormality compared with the standard $3\times 3$ convolution; the shuffle attention enables the PCSANet model to focus on more pathological abnormality features. The extensive experiment on the ChestX-ray14 and COVIDx datasets demonstrate that the PCSANet model achieves superior performance compared with the other state-of-the-art methods. The ablation study further proves that pyramidal convolution and shuffle attention can effectively improve thoracic disease classification performance. The code is published in https://github.com/Warrior996/PCSANet.