Chest X-ray classification using Deep learning for automated COVID-19 screening

In today’s world, we find ourselves struggling to fight one of the worst pandemics in the history of humanity known as COVID-2019 caused by a coronavirus. If we detect the virus at an early stage (before it enters the lower respiratory tract), the patient can be treated quickly. Once the virus reaches the lungs, we observe ground-glass opacity in the chest X-ray due to fibrosis in the lungs. Due to the significant differences between X-ray images of an infected and non-infected person, artificial intelligence techniques can be used to identify the presence and severity of the infection. We propose a classification model that can analyze the chest X-rays and help in the accurate diagnosis of COVID-19. Our methodology classifies the chest X-rays into 4 classes viz. normal, pneumonia, tuberculosis (TB), and COVID-19. Further, the X-rays indicating COVID-19 are classified on severity-basis into mild, medium, and severe. The deep learning model used for the classification of pneumonia, TB, and normal is VGG16 with an accuracy of 95.9 %. For the segregation of normal pneumonia and COVID-19, the DenseNet-161 was used with an accuracy of 98.9 %. ResNet-18 worked best for severity classification achieving accuracy up to 76 %. Our approach allows mass screening of the people using X-rays as a primary validation for COVID-19.