Deep Learning Approaches for Detecting Pneumonia in COVID-19 Patients by Analyzing Chest X-Ray Images

The COVID-19 pandemic has wreaked havoc in the daily life of human beings and devastated many economies worldwide, claiming millions of lives so far. Studies on COVID-19 have shown that older adults and people with a history of various medical issues, specifically prior cases of pneumonia, are at a higher risk of developing severe complications from COVID-19. As pneumonia is a common type of infection that spreads in the lungs, doctors usually perform chest X-ray to identify the infected regions of the lungs. In this study, machine learning tools such as LabelBinarizer are used to perform one-hot encoding on the labeled chest X-ray images and transform them into categorical form using Python’s to_categorical tool. Subsequently, various deep learning features such as convolutional neural network (CNN), VGG16, AveragePooling2D, dropout, flatten, dense, and input are used to build a detection model. Adam is used as an optimizer, which can be further applied to predict pneumonia in COVID-19 patients. The model predicted pneumonia with an average accuracy of 91.69%, sensitivity of 95.92%, and specificity of 100%. The model also efficiently reduces training loss and increases accuracy.