Discriminative Approach Lung Diseases and COVID-19 from Chest X-Ray Images Using Convolutional Neural Networks: A Promising Approach for Accurate Diagnosis

Medical imaging treatment is one of the best-known computer science disciplines. It can be used to detect the presence of several diseases such as skin cancer and brain tumors, and since the arrival of the coronavirus (COVID-19), this technique has been used to alleviate the heavy burden placed on all health institutions and personnel, given the high rate of spread of this virus in the population. One of the problems encountered in diagnosing people suspected of having contracted COVID-19 is the difficulty of distinguishing symptoms due to this virus from those of other diseases such as influenza, as they are similar. This paper proposes a new approach to distinguishing between lung diseases and COVID-19 by analyzing chest x-ray images using a convolutional neural network (CNN) architecture. To achieve this, pre-processing was carried out on the dataset using histogram equalization, and then we trained two sub-datasets from the dataset using the Train et Test, the first to be used in the training phase and the second to be used in the model validation phase. Then a CNN architecture composed of several convolution layers and fully connected layers was deployed to train our model. Finally, we evaluated our model using two different metrics: the confusion matrix and the receiver operating characteristic. The simulation results recorded are satisfactory, with an accuracy rate of 96.27%.