Automated Detection of COVID-19 through Convolutional Neural Network using Chest x-ray images

Sarki, R.; Ahmed, K.; Wang, H.; Zhang, Y.; Wang, K.

The COVID-19 epidemic appears to have a catastrophic impact on global well-being and public health. More than 10 million confirmed cases have been reported worldwide until now. Due to the growing number of confirmed cases, timely and accurate classification of healthy and infected patients is essential to control and treat COVID-19. To this end, in this paper, we aim to develop a deep learning-based system for the persuasive classification and reliable detection of COVID- 19 using chest radiography. Firstly, we evaluate the performance of various state-of-the-art convolutional neural networks (CNNs) proposed over recent years for medical image classification. Secondly, we develop and train CNN from scratch. In both cases, we use a recently published public X-Ray dataset for training and validation purposes. For transfer learning, we obtain 100% accuracy for binary classification (i.e., Normal/COVID-19) and 87.50% accuracy for tertiary classification (Normal/COVID- 19/Pneumonia). With the CNN trained from scratch, we achieve 93.75% accuracy for tertiary classification. We observe, in the case of transfer learning, the classification accuracy drops with an increased number of classes. Our comprehensive ROC and confusion metric analysis with 10-fold cross-validation strongly underpin our findings.