COVID-19 Chest X-Ray Image Classification Using Deep Learning

The rise of the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic has made it necessary to improve existing medical screening and clinical management of this disease. While COVID-19 patients are known to exhibit a variety of symptoms, the major symptoms include fever, cough, and fatigue. Since these symptoms also appear in pneumonia patients, this creates complications in COVID-19 detection especially during the flu season. Early studies identified abnormalities in chest X-ray images of COVID-19 infected patients that could be beneficial for disease diagnosis. Therefore, chest X-ray image-based disease classification has emerged as an alternative to aid medical diagnosis. However, manual detection of COVID-19 from a set of chest X-ray images comprising both COVID-19 and pneumonia cases is cumbersome and prone to human error. Thus, artificial intelligence techniques powered by deep learning algorithms, which learn from radiography images and predict presence of COVID-19 have potential to enhance current diagnosis process. Towards this purpose, here we implemented a set of deep learning pre-trained models such as ResNet, VGG, Inception and EfficientNet in conjunction with developing a computer vision AI system based on our own convolutional neural network (CNN) model: Deep Learning in Healthcare (DLH)-COVID. All these CNN models cater to image classification exercise. We used publicly available resources of 6,432 images and further strengthened our model by tuning hyperparameters to provide better generalization during the model validation phase. Our final DLH-COVID model yielded the highest accuracy of 96% in detection of COVID-19 from chest X-ray images when compared to images of both pneumonia-affected and healthy individuals. Given the practicality of acquiring chest X-ray images by patients, we also developed a web application (link: <ext-link xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink" ext-link-type="uri" xlink:href="https://toad.li/xray">https://toad.li/xray</ext-link>) based on our model to directly enable users to upload chest X-ray images and detect the presence of COVID-19 within a few seconds. Taken together, here we introduce a state-of-the-art artificial intelligence-based system for efficient COVID-19 detection and a user-friendly application that has the capacity to become a rapid COVID-19 diagnosis method in the near future.