An Interpretable Deep Learning Model for Covid-19 Detection With Chest X-Ray Images

Timely and accurate detection of an epidemic/pandemic is always desired to prevent its spread. For the detection of any disease, there can be more than one approach including deep learning models. However, transparency/interpretability of the reasoning process of a deep learning model related to health science is a necessity. Thus, we introduce an interpretable deep learning model: Gen-ProtoPNet. Gen-ProtoPNet is closely related to two interpretable deep learning models: ProtoPNet and NP-ProtoPNet The latter two models use prototypes of spacial dimension 1×1 and the distance function L2. In our model, we use a generalized version of the distance function L2 that enables us to use prototypes of any type of spacial dimensions, that is, square spacial dimensions and rectangular spacial dimensions to classify an input image. The accuracy and precision that our model receives is on par with the best performing non-interpretable deep learning models when we tested the models on the dataset of X-ray images. Our model attains the highest accuracy of 87.27% on classification of three classes of images, that is close to the accuracy of 88.42% attained by a non-interpretable model on the classification of the given dataset.