Study on Convolutional Neural Network to Detect COVID-19 from Chest X-Rays

The world is facing a pandemic due to the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19), named as per the World Health Organization. COVID-19 is caused by the virus called severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), which was initially discovered in late December 2019 in Wuhan, China. Later, the virus had spread throughout the world within a few months. COVID-19 has become a global health crisis because millions of people worldwide are affected by this fatal virus. Fever, dry cough, and gastrointestinal problems are the most common signs of COVID-19. The disease is highly contagious, and affected people can easily spread the virus to those with whom they have close contact. Thus, contact tracing is a suitable solution to prevent the virus from spreading. The method of identifying all persons with whom a COVID-19-affected patient has come into contact in the last 2 weeks is called contact tracing. This study presents an investigation of a convolutional neural network (CNN), which makes the test faster and more reliable, to detect COVID-19 from chest X-ray (CXR) images. Because there are many studies in this field, the designed model focuses on increasing the accuracy level and uses a transfer learning approach and a custom model. Pretrained deep CNN models, such as VGG16, InceptionV3, MobileNetV2, and ResNet50, have been used for deep feature extraction. The performance measurement in this study was based on classification accuracy. The results of this study indicate that deep learning can recognize SARS-CoV-2 from CXR images. The designed model provided 93% accuracy and 98% validation accuracy, and the pretrained customized models such as MobileNetV2 obtained 97% accuracy, InceptionV3 obtained 98%, and VGG16 obtained 98% accuracy, respectively. Among these models, InceptionV3 has recorded the highest accuracy.