Problems of Deploying CNN Transfer Learning to Detect COVID-19 from Chest X-rays

The Covid-19 first occurs in Wuhan, China in December 2019. After that the virus spread all around the world and at the time of writing this paper the total number of confirmed cases are above 4.7 million with over 315000 deaths. Machine learning algorithms built on radiography images can be used as a decision support mechanism to aid radiologists to speed up the diagnostic process. The aim of this work is to conduct a critical analysis to investigate the applicability of convolutional neural networks (CNNs) for the purpose of COVID-19 detection in chest X-ray images and highlight the issues of using CNN directly on the whole image. To achieve this task, we first use 12-off-the-shelf CNN architectures in transfer learning mode on 3 publicly available chest X-ray databases together with proposing a shallow CNN architecture in which we train it from scratch. Chest X-ray images fed into CNN models without any preprocessing to follow the many of researches using chest X-rays in this manner. Next, a qualitative investigation performed to inspect the decisions made by CNNs using a technique known as class activation maps (CAM). Using CAMs, one can map the activations contributed most to the decision of CNNs back to the original image to visualize the most discriminating regions on the input image.

We conclude that CNN decisions should not be taken into consideration, despite their high classification accuracy, until clinicians can visually inspect, and approve, the region(s) of the input image used by CNNs that lead to its prediction.