Automated detection of COVID-19 coronavirus infection based on analysis of chest X-ray images by deep learning methods

Early detection of COVID-19 infected patients is essential to ensure adequate treatment and reduce the load on the healthcare systems. One of effective methods for detecting COVID-19 is deep learning models of chest X-ray images. They can detect the changes caused by COVID-19 even in asymptomatic patients, so they have great potential as auxiliary systems for diagnostics or screening tools. This paper proposed a methodology consisting of the stage of pre-processing of X-ray images, augmentation and classification using deep convolutional neural networksXception, InceptionResNetV2, MobileNetV2, DenseNet121, ResNet50 and VGG16, previously trained on thelmageNet dataset. Next, they fine-tuned and trained on prepared data set of chest X-rays images. The results of computer experiments showed that theVGG16 model with fine tuning of the parameters demonstrated the best performance in the classification of COVID-19 with accuracy 99,09%, recall=98,318%, precision=99,08% and f1_score=98,78. This signifies the performance of proposed fine-tuned deep learning models for COVID-19 detection on chest X-ray images.