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• A novel multi-kernel-size spatial-channel attention model for COVID-19 detection • The proposed method enables early diagnosis from chest X-ray images. • Evaluation with real-world data demonstrates improved accuracy at 98.2 Novel coronavirus 2019 (COVID-19) has spread rapidly around the world and is threatening the health and lives of people worldwide. Early detection of COVID-19 positive patients and timely isolation of the patients are essential to prevent its spread. Chest X-ray images of COVID-19 patients often show the characteristics of multifocality, bilateral hairy glass turbidity, patchy network turbidity, etc. It is crucial to design a method to automatically identify COVID-19 from chest X-ray images to help diagnosis and prognosis. Existing studies for the classification of COVID-19 rarely consider the role of attention mechanisms on the classification of chest X-ray images and fail to capture the cross-channel and cross-spatial interrelationships in multiple scopes. This paper proposes a multi-kernel-size spatial-channel attention method to detect COVID-19 from chest X-ray images. Our proposed method consists of three stages. The first stage is feature extraction. The second stage contains two parallel multi-kernel-size attention modules: multi-kernel-size spatial attention and multi-kernel-size channel attention. The two modules capture the cross-channel and cross-spatial interrelationships in multiple scopes using multiple 1D and 2D convolutional kernels of different sizes to obtain channel and spatial attention feature maps. The third stage is the classification module. We integrate the chest X-ray images from three public datasets: COVID-19 Chest X-ray Dataset Initiative, ActualMed COVID-19 Chest X-ray Dataset Initiative, and COVID-19 radiography database for evaluation. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method improves the performance of COVID-19 detection and achieves an accuracy of 98.2%. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]