COVID-19 detection with X-ray images by using transfer learning

Abstract

Coronavirus is an infectious disease induced by extreme acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2. Novel coronaviruses can lead to mild to serious symptoms, like tiredness, nausea, fever, dry cough and breathlessness. Coronavirus symptoms are close to influenza, pneumonia and common cold. So Coronavirus can only be confirmed with a diagnostic test. 218 countries and territories worldwide have reported a total of 59.6 million active cases of the COVID-19 and 1.4 million deaths as of November 24, 2020. Rapid, accurate and early medical diagnosis of the disease is vital at this stage. Researchers analyzed the CT and X-ray findings from a large number of patients with coronavirus pneumonia to draw their conclusions. In this paper, we applied Support Vector Machine (SVM) classifier. After that we moved on to deep transfer learning models such as VGG16 and Xception which are implemented using Keras and Tensor flow to detect positive coronavirus patient using X-ray images. VGG16 and Xception show better performances as compared to SVM. In our work, Xception gained an accuracy of 97.46% with 98% f-score.