The application of chest X-ray imaging for early disease screening is attracting interest from the computer vision and deep learning community. To date, various deep learning models have been applied in X-ray image analysis. However, models perform inconsistently depending on the dataset. In this paper, we consider each individual model as a medical doctor. We then propose a doctor consultation-inspired method that fuses multiple models. In particular, we consider both early and late fusion mechanisms for consultation. The early fusion mechanism combines the deep learned features from multiple models, whereas the late fusion method combines the confidence scores of all individual models. Experiments on two X-ray imaging datasets demonstrate the superiority of the proposed method relative to baseline. The experimental results also show that early consultation consistently outperforms the late consultation mechanism in both benchmark datasets. In particular, the early doctor consultation-inspired model outperforms all individual models by a large margin, i.e., 3.03 and 1.86 in terms of accuracy in the UIT COVID-19 and chest X-ray datasets, respectively.

The COVID-19 pandemic presents significant challenges due to its high transmissibility and mortality risk. Traditional diagnostic methods, such as RT-PCR, have limitations that hinder timely and accurate screening. In response, AI-powered computer-aided imaging analysis techniques have emerged as a promising alternative for COVID-19 diagnosis. In this paper, we propose a novel approach that combines the strengths of Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) and Vision Transformer (ViT) to enhance the performance of COVID-19 diagnosis models. CNN excels at capturing spatial features in medical images, while ViT leverages self-attention mechanisms inspired by human radiologists. Additionally, our approach draws inspiration from subclinical diagnosis, a collaborative process involving attending physicians and specialists, which has proven effective in achieving accurate and comprehensive diagnoses. To this end, we employ an early fusion strategy integrating CNN and ViT, then fed into a residual neural network. By fusing these complementary features, our approach achieves state-of-the-art performance in accurately identifying COVID-19 cases on two benchmark datasets: Chest X-ray and Clean-CC-CCII. This research has the potential to enable timely and accurate screening, aiding in the early detection and management of COVID-19 cases. Our findings contribute to the growing knowledge of AI-powered diagnostic techniques and demonstrate the potential for advanced imaging analysis methods to support medical professionals in combating the ongoing pandemic.