Deep Learning for Automated Recognition of Covid-19 from Chest X-ray Images

Abstract

Abstract Background The pandemic caused by coronavirus in recent months is having a devastating global effect, which puts the world under the most ever unprecedented emergency. Currently, since there are not effective antiviral treatments for Covid-19 yet, it is crucial to early detect and monitor the progression of the disease, thus helping to reduce mortality. While a corresponding vaccine is being developed, and different measures are being used to combat the virus, medical imaging techniques have also been investigated to assist doctors in diagnosing this disease. Objective This paper presents a practical solution for the detection of Covid-19 from chest X-ray (CXR) images, exploiting cutting-edge Machine Learning techniques. Methods We employ EfficientNet and MixNet, two recently developed families of deep neural networks, as the main classification engine. Furthermore, we also apply different transfer learning strategies, aiming at making the training process more accurate and efficient. The proposed approach has been validated by means of two real datasets, the former consists of 13,511 training images and 1,489 testing images, the latter has 14,324 and 3,581 images for training and testing, respectively. Results The results are promising: by all the experimental configurations considered in the evaluation, our approach always yields an accuracy larger than 95.0%, with the maximum accuracy obtained being 96.64%. Conclusions As a comparison with various existing studies, we can thus conclude that our performance improvement is significant.