COVID-19 Diagnosis from Chest X-ray Images Using Deep Learning Approach

Coronavirus (COVID-19) disease is an infectious disease caused by the newly and deadly pneumonia type identified Coronavirus2 (SARS-CoV-2). A real-time Reverse Transcription Polymerase Chain Reaction (RT-PCR) is the main method and has been regarded as the gold standard for diagnosing the COVID-19. Strict requirements and the limited supply of RT-PCR kits for the laboratory environment leads to delay in the accurate diagnosis of patients in addition to the test takes 4-6 hours to obtain the results. To tackle this problem, radiological images such as chest X-rays and CT scan could be the answer to test the COVID-19 infection rapidly and more efficiently. In this paper, an efficient proposed Convolution Neural Network (CNN) architecture model for COVID-19 detection based on chest X-ray images is presented. The proposed model is developed to provide accurate detection for binary classification (Normal vs. COVID-19), three class classification (Normal vs. COVID-19 vs. Pneumonia), and four class classification (Normal vs. COVID-19 vs. Pneumonia vs. Tuberculosis (TB)). Our proposed model produced an overall testing accuracy of 99.7%, 95.02%, and 94.53% for binary, three, and four class classifications, respectively. A comparison is made between this work and others shows the superior of this work over the others.