Machine learning based COVID -19 disease recognition using CT images of SIRM database

Abstract The COVID-19 pandemic, probably one of the most widespread pandemics humanity has encountered in the twenty first century, caused death to almost 1.75 M people worldwide, impacting almost 80 M lives with direct contact. In order to contain the spread of coronavirus, it is necessary to develop a reliant and quick method to identify those who are affected and isolate them until full recovery is made. The imagery knowledge has been shown to be useful for quick COVID-19 diagnosis. Though the scans of computational tomography (CT) demonstrate a range of viral infection signals, considering the vast number of images, certain visual characteristics are challenging to distinguish and can take a long time to be identified by radiologists. In this study for detection of the COVID-19, a dataset is formed by taking 3764 images. The feature extraction process is applied to the dataset to increase the classification performance. Techniques like Grey Level Co-occurrence Matrix (GLCM) and Discrete Wavelet Transform (DWT) are used for feature extraction. Then various machine learning algorithms applied such as Support Vector Machines (SVM), Linear Discriminant Analysis (LDA), Multi- Level Perceptron, Naive Bayes, K-Nearest Neighbours and Random Forests are used for classification of COVID-19 disease detection. Sensitivity, Specificity, Accuracy, Precision, and F-score are the metrics used to measure the performance of different machine learning models. Among these machine learning models SVM with GLCM as feature extraction technique using 10-fold cross validation gives the best classification result with 99.70% accuracy, 99.80% sensitivity and 97.03% F-score. We also ran these tests on different data sets and found that the results are similar across those too, as discussed later in the results section.