Detecting COVID-19 Status Using Chest X-ray Images and Symptoms Analysis by Own Developed Mathematical Model: A Model Development and Analysis Approach

Abstract

COVID-19 is a life-threatening infectious disease that has become a pandemic. The virus grows within the lower respiratory tract, where early-stage symptoms (such as cough, fever, and sore throat) develop, and then it causes a lung infection (pneumonia). This paper proposes a new artificial testing methodology to determine whether a patient has been infected by COVID-19. We have presented a prediction model based on a convolutional neural network (CNN) and our own developed mathematical equation-based algorithm named SymptomNet. The CNN algorithm classifies lung infections (pneumonia) using frontal chest X-ray images, and the symptom analysis algorithm (SymptomNet) predicts the possibility of COVID-19 infection from the developed symptoms in a patient. By combining the CNN image classifier method and SymptomNet algorithm, we have developed a model that predicts COVID-19 patients with an approximate accuracy of 96%. Ten out of the 13 symptoms were significantly correlated to the COVID-19 disease. Specially, fever, cough, body chills, shortness of breath, muscle pain, and sore throat were shown to be significantly related (r = 0.20; p = 0.001, r = 0.20; p < 0.001, r = 0.22; p < 0.001, r = 0.16; p < 0.001, r = −0.45; p < 0.001, r = −0.35; p < 0.001, respectively). In this model, the CNN classifier has an accuracy of approximately 96% (training loss = 0.1311, training accuracy = 0.9596, validation loss: 0.2754, and validation accuracy of 0.9273, F1-score: 94.16, precision: 91.33), and the SymptomNet algorithm has an accuracy of 97% (485 successful predictions out of 500 samples). This research work obtained promising accuracy while predicting COVID-19-infected patients. The proposed model can be ubiquitously used at a low cost and achieve high accuracy.