A Deep Transfer Learning Approach to Diagnose Covid-19 using X-ray Images

Progga, N. I.; Hossain, M. S.; Andersson, K.; Ieee,

The Covid-19 disease which was caused by novel coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2) has already become a great threat for humans beings. The virus is spreading rapidly around the world. Therefore, we crucially need quick diagnostic tests to identify affected patients and to minimize the spread of the virus. With the advancements of Machine Learning, the detection of Covid-19 in the early stage would facilitate taking precautions as early as possible. However, because of the lack of data-sets, especially chest X-ray images of Covid-19 affected patients, it has become challenging to detect this disease. In this paper, a deep transfer learning-based pre-trained model is named VGG16 along with adapt histogram equalization has been developed to diagnose Covid-19 by using X-ray images. An image processing technique named adaptive histogram equalization has been used to generate more images by using the existing data set. It can be observed that VGG-16 provides the highest accuracy which is 98.75% in comparison to two other pre-trained models such as VGG-19 and Mobilnenet-V2(97% accuracy for VGG-19, 92.65% accuracy for Mobilenet-V2).