COVID-19 Detection on X-Ray Images using a Combining Mechanism of Pre-trained CNNs

Abstract

The COVID-19 infection was sparked by the severe acute respiratory syndrome SARS-CoV-2, as mentioned by the World Health Organization, and originated in Wuhan, Republic of China, eventually extending to every nation worldwide in 2020. This research aims to establish an efficient Medical Diagnosis Support System (MDSS) for recognizing COVID-19 in chest radiography with X-ray data. To build an ever more efficient classifier, this MDSS employs the concatenation mechanism to merge pretrained convolutional neural networks (CNNs) predicated on Transfer Learning (TL) classifiers. In the feature extraction phase, this proposed classifier employs a parallel deep feature extraction approach based on Deep Learning (DL). As a result, this approach increases the accuracy of our proposed model, thus identifying COVID-19 cases with higher accuracy. The suggested concatenation classifier was trained and validated using a Chest Radiography image database with four categories: COVID-19, Normal, Pneumonia, and Tuberculosis during this research. Furthermore, we integrated four separate public X-Ray imaging datasets to construct this dataset. In contrast, our mentioned concatenation classifier achieved 99.66% accuracy and 99.48% sensitivity respectively.