Computer-aided diagnosis (CAD) methods such as Chest X-rays (CXR)-based method is one of the cheapest alternative options to diagnose the early stage of COVID-19 disease compared to other alternatives such as Polymerase Chain Reaction (PCR), Computed Tomography (CT) scan, and so on. To this end, there have been few works proposed to diagnose COVID-19 by using CXR-based methods. However, they have limited performance as they ignore the spatial relationships between the region of interests (ROIs) in CXR images, which could identify the likely regions of COVID-19’s effect in the human lungs. In this paper, we propose a novel attention-based deep learning model using the attention module with VGG-16. By using the attention module, we capture the spatial relationship between the ROIs in CXR images. In the meantime, by using an appropriate convolution layer (4th pooling layer) of the VGG-16 model in addition to the attention module, we design a novel deep learning model to perform fine-tuning in the classification process. To evaluate the performance of our method, we conduct extensive experiments by using three COVID-19 CXR image datasets. The experiment and analysis demonstrate the stable and promising performance of our proposed method compared to the state-of-the-art methods. The promising classification performance of our proposed method indicates that it is suitable for CXR image classification in COVID-19 diagnosis.

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