Deep Learning for COVID-19 Diagnosis: A Comparative Study of Vision Transformers and CNNs
摘要
In this study, we evaluate and compare the performance of two deep learning architectures—TinyViT and ResNet50—for the classification of COVID-19 from the chest CT scans of the publicly available HUST COVID-19 CT dataset. The dataset comprises 5705 non-informative CT (NiCT) images with no visible lung parenchyma features, 4001 positive CT (pCT) images with evident findings of COVID-19 pneumonia, and 9979 negative CT (nCT) images with no findings of COVID-19. Both the models were learned to make a prediction of CT images into any one of the three classes: NiCT, pCT, or nCT. Experiment results indicate that TinyViT outperforms ResNet50 with accuracy and F1-score of 98%, whereas ResNet50 achieves merely 96% on both the scores. The experiment results indicate the potential of light-weight vision transformers like TinyViT in optimizing diagnostic accuracy while maintaining computational efficiency, making them prime contenders for being deployed to resource-constrained clinical settings.