A Fast and Reliable Approach for COVID-19 Detection from CT-Scan Images

Abstract

Background: COVID-19 is a highly contagious respiratory disease with multiple mutant variants, an asymptotic nature in patients, and with potential to stay undetected in common tests, which makes it deadlier, more transmissible, and harder to detect. Regardless of variants, the COVID-19 infection shows several observable anomalies in the computed tomography (CT) scans of the lungs, even in the early stages of infection. A quick and reliable way of detecting COVID-19 is essential to manage the growing transmission of COVID-19 and save lives. Objective: This study focuses on developing a deep learning model that can be used as an auxiliary decision system to detect COVID-19 from chest CT-scan images quickly and effectively. Methods: In this research, we propose a MobileNet-based transfer learning model to detect COVID-19 in CT-scan images. To test the performance of our proposed model, we collect three publicly available COVID-19 CT-scan datasets and prepare another dataset by combining the collected datasets. We also implement a mobile application using the model trained on the combined dataset, which can be used as an auxiliary decision system for COVID-19 screening in real life. Results: Our proposed model achieves a promising accuracy of 96.14% on the combined dataset and accuracy of 98.75%, 98.54%, and 97.84% respectively in detecting COVID-19 samples on the collected datasets. It also outperforms other transfer learning models while having lower memory consumption, ensuring the best performance in both normal and low-powered, resource-constrained devices. Conclusion: We believe, the promising performance of our proposed method will facilitate its use as an auxiliary decision system to detect COVID-19 patients quickly and reliably. This will allow authorities to take immediate measures to limit COVID-19 transmission to prevent further casualties as well as accelerate the screening for COVID-19 while reducing the workload of medical personnel. Keywords: Auxiliary Decision System, COVID-19, CT Scan, Deep Learning, MobileNet, Transfer Learning