Improving Coronavirus (COVID-19) Diagnosis using Deep Transfer Learning

Abstract

Abstract Background Coronavirus disease (COVID-19) is an infectious disease caused by a new virus. Exponential growth is not only threatening lives, but also impacting businesses and disrupting travel around the world. Aim The aim of this work is to develop an efficient diagnosis of COVID-19 disease by differentiating it from viral pneumonia, bacterial pneumonia and healthy cases using deep learning techniques. Method In this work, we have used pre-trained knowledge to improve the diagnostic performance using transfer learning techniques and compared the performance different CNN architectures. Results Evaluation results using K-fold (10) showed that we have achieved state of the art performance with overall accuracy of 98.75% on the perspective of CT and X-ray cases as a whole. Conclusion Quantitative evaluation showed high accuracy for automatic diagnosis of COVID-19. Pre-trained deep learning models develop in this study could be used early screening of coronavirus, however it calls for extensive need to CT or X-rays dataset to develop a reliable application.