A deep learning approach for COVID-19 detection from computed tomography scans

Abstract

The classification of COVID-19 patients from chest computed tomography (CT) images is a very difficult task due to the similarities observed with other lung diseases. Based on various CT scans of COVID and non-COVID patients, the aim of this chapter is to propose a simple deep learning architecture and compare its diagnostic performance using transfer learning and several machine learning techniques that could extract COVID-19’s graphical features and classify them in order to provide a clinical diagnosis ahead of the pathogenic test, thus saving critical time for disease control. We also compare our approach and show that it outperforms various previous state-of-the-art techniques. We propose a deep learning architecture for transfer learning that is just a simple modification of eight new layers on the ImageNet pretrained convolutional neural networks (CNNs) which yielded us the best test accuracy of 98.30%, F1 score of 0.982, area under the receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve of 0.982, and kappa value of 0.964 after training. Moreover, we use the proposed architecture for feature extraction and study the performance of various classifiers on them and were able to obtain the highest test accuracy of 91.75% with K-nearest neighbors.

Also, we compare multiple CNNs and machine learning models for their diagnostic potential in disease detection and suggest a much faster and automated disease detection methodology. We show that smaller and memory efficient architectures are equally good compared to deep and heavy architectures at classifying chest CTs. We also show that visual geometry group (VGG) architectures are overall the best for this task.