A Combined Deep CNN-LSTM Network for the Detection of Novel Coronavirus (COVID-19) Using X-ray Images

Nowadays automatic disease detection has become a crucial issue in medical science with the rapid growth of population. Coronavirus (COVID-19) has become one of the most severe and acute diseases in very recent times that has been spread globally. Automatic disease detection framework assists the doctors in the diagnosis of disease and provides exact, consistent, and fast reply as well as reduces the death rate. Therefore, an automated detection system should be implemented as the fastest way of diagnostic option to impede COVID-19 from spreading. This paper aims to introduce a deep learning technique based on the combination of a convolutional neural network (CNN) and long short-term memory (LSTM) to diagnose COVID-19 automatically from X-ray images. In this system, CNN is used for deep feature extraction and LSTM is used for detection using the extracted feature. A collection of 421 X-ray images including 141 images of COVID-19 is used as a dataset in this system. The experimental results show that our proposed system has achieved 97% accuracy, 91% specificity, and 100% sensitivity. The system achieved desired results on a small dataset which can be further improved when more COVID-19 images become available. The proposed system can assist doctors to diagnose and treatment the COVID-19 patients easily.