Human Monkeypox Disease Detection Using Deep Learning and Attention Mechanisms

As the world is still trying to rebuild from the destruction caused by the widespread reach of the COVID-19 virus, and the recent alarming surge of human monkeypox outbreaks in numerous countries threatens to become a new global pandemic too. Human monkeypox disease symptoms are quite similar to chickenpox, and measles classic symptoms, with very intricate differences such as skin blisters, which come in diverse forms. Various deep-learning methods have shown promising performance in the image-based diagnosis of Covid-19, tumor cell, and skin disease classification tasks. In this paper, we try to integrate deep transfer learning-based methods, along with a convolutional block attention module (CBAM) to focus on the relevant portion of feature maps to conduct an image-based classification of human monkeypox disease. We implement five deep learning models—VGG19, Xception, DenseNet121, EfficientNetB3, and MobileNetV2 along with integrated channel and spatial attention mechanisms and perform a comparative analysis among them. An architecture consisting of Xception-CBAM-Dense layers performed better than the other models at classifying monkeypox and other diseases with a validation accuracy of 83.89%.

I. Introduction

According to World Health Organization (WHO) [1], Monkeypox is a rare disease caused by the monkeypox virus. It can spread from animals to people and is transferable between people and the environment since it is a viral zoonotic infection. The monkeypox outbreak became the most talked-about topic in the world after the COVID-19 pandemic was over. Up to this point, a total of 72,874 confirmed cases have been discovered, including 28 deaths across 12 locations [2]. Fever, headache, muscle aches, back discomfort, low energy, and swollen lymph nodes are the most typical signs of monkeypox, which can also be followed by the appearance of a rash [1]. The face, palms of the hands, soles of the feet, groin, genital, and/or anal regions might all be affected by the rash [1]. The slight distinction between monkeypox and others (measles, chickenpox) is inflammation and rash on the body, which is difficult to detect by human eyes except by the Polymerase Chain Reaction (PCR) Test.