COVID-19 infection detection using convolutional self-attention network with voting classifier

Abstract

Early and accurate detection of COVID-19 from chest computed tomography (CT) scans are becoming essential for effective clinical decision-making and disease control. This study is proposing a robust deep learning framework that integrates a convolutional self-attention network (CSAN), gamma correction for image enhancement, and a voting-based ensemble classifier to improving diagnostic performance. The model is being evaluated on a dataset of 2,271 CT images and is achieving an accuracy of 95.12%, sensitivity of 97.25%, specificity of 98.11%, F1-score of 96.46%, and area under the curve (AUC) of 0.977. Experimental results are demonstrating that the proposed method significantly surpasses baseline models, including standalone CSAN, residual networks 50 (ResNet-50), densely connected convolutional network 121 (DenseNet-121), and visual geometry group (VGG) 16, with improvements of up to 9.5% in accuracy. The integration of attention mechanisms, image enhancement, and ensemble learning are proving effective in capturing both local and global features, leading to more reliable classification. These findings are suggesting that the proposed framework is supporting automated COVID-19 diagnosis in real-world clinical applications.