Abstract
Deep learning assisted disease diagnosis using chest radiol- ogy images to assess severity of various respiratory conditions has gar- nered a lot of attention after the recent COVID-19 pandemic. Under- standing characteristic features associated with the disease in radiology images, along with variations observed from patient-to-patient and with the progression of disease, is important while building such models. In this work, we carried out comparative analysis of various deep architec- tures with the proposed attention-based Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) model with customized bottleneck residual module (Attn-CNN) in classifying chest CT images into three categories, COVID-19, Normal, and Pneumonia. We show that the attention model with fewer parame- ters achieved better classification performance compared to state-of-the- art deep architectures such as EfficientNet-B7, Inceptionv3, ResNet-50 and VGG-16, and customized models proposed in similar studies such as COVIDNet-CT, CTnet-10, COVID-19Net, etc.