Hybrid Artificial Intelligence Approach to COVID-19 Diagnosis from CT Images: Deep Networks and Classification Analysis

Abstract

Using lung images obtained by computed tomography (CT), this study aims to detect coronavirus (Covid-19) disease with deep learning (DL) techniques. The study included 751 lung CT images from 118 Covid-19 patients and 628 lung CT images from 100 healthy individuals. In total, 70% of the 1379 images were used for training and 30% for testing. In the study, two different methods were proposed on the same dataset. In the first method, the images were trained on AlexNet, VGG-16, VGG-19, GoogleNet and a proposed network. The performance metrics obtained from the five networks were compared and it was observed that the proposed network achieved the highest accuracy value with 95.61%. In the second method, the images were trained on VGG-16, VGG-19, DenseNet-121, ResNet-50 and MobileNet networks. Among the image features obtained from each of these networks, the best 1000 features were selected by Principal Component Analysis (PCA). The best 1000 features were classified with Random Forest (RF) and Support Vector Machines (SVM). According to the classification results, the best 1000 features selected from the features extracted by the VGG-16 and MobileNet networks were obtained with the highest accuracy rate of 93.94% using SVM. It is thought that this study can be a helpful tool in the diagnosis of Covid-19 disease while reducing time and labor costs with the use of artificial intelligence (AI).