Detection and Classification of COVID-19 Chest X-rays by the Deep Learning Technique

Abstract

The Coronavirus disease (COVID-19) infection has become a pandemic, and this is the most critical problem that has occurred in Thailand and also expanded all over the world. As such, it is not astonishing to know that this virus has had a direct effect on hospitals with the delayed screening of patients because of the increasing number of daily cases and the shortage of medical personnel and restricted treatment space. Due to such restrictions, in this study, we used a clinical decision-making system with predictive algorithms. Predictive algorithms could potentially ease the strain on healthcare systems by identifying the diseases. Moreover, image classification is one interesting aspect of image processing. Convolutional neural network (CNN) is a widely used algorithm for image classification by separating the images of the COVID-19 disease, images with a lung infection, and normal images. To evaluate the predictive performance of our models, precision, F1-score, recall, receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve (area under the ROC curve), and accuracy scores were used. It was observed that the predictive models trained on the laboratory findings could be used to predict the COVID-19 infection as well and could be helpful for medical experts to appropriately prioritize the resources. This could be employed to assist medical experts in validating their initial laboratory findings and could also be used for clinical prediction studies.