Boosting Automatic COVID-19 Detection Performance with Self-Supervised Learning and Batch Knowledge Ensembling

Background and objective: COVID-19 and its variants have caused significant disruptions in over 200 countries and regions worldwide, affecting the health and lives of billions of people. Detecting COVID-19 from chest X-Ray (CXR) images has become one of the fastest and easiest methods for detecting COVID-19 since the common occurrence of radiological pneumonia findings in COVID-19 patients. We present a novel high-accuracy COVID-19 detection method that uses CXR images. Methods: Our method consists of two phases. One is self-supervised learning-based pertaining; the other is batch knowledge ensembling-based fine-tuning. Self-supervised learning-based pretraining can learn distinguished representations from CXR images without manually annotated labels. On the other hand, batch knowledge ensembling-based fine-tuning can utilize category knowledge of images in a batch according to their visual feature similarities to improve detection performance. Unlike our previous implementation, we introduce batch knowledge ensembling into the fine-tuning phase, reducing the memory used in self-supervised learning and improving COVID-19 detection accuracy. Results: On two public COVID-19 CXR datasets, namely, a large dataset and an unbalanced dataset, our method exhibited promising COVID-19 detection performance. Our method maintains high detection accuracy even when annotated CXR training images are reduced significantly (e.g., using only 10% of the original dataset). In addition, our method is insensitive to changes in hyperparameters. Conclusions: The proposed method outperforms other state-of-the-art COVID-19 detection methods in different settings. Our method can reduce the workloads of healthcare providers and radiologists.