An efficient technique for CT scan images classification of COVID-19

Abstract

Nowadays, Coronavirus (COVID-19) considered one of the most critical pandemics in the earth. This is due its ability to spread rapidly between humans as well as animals. COVID-19 expected to outbreak around the world, around 70 % of the earth population might infected with COVID-19 in the incoming years. Therefore, an accurate and efficient diagnostic tool is highly required, which the main objective of our study. Manual classification was mainly used to detect different diseases, but it took too much time in addition to the probability of human errors. Automatic image classification reduces doctors diagnostic time, which could save human’s life. We propose an automatic classification architecture based on deep neural network called Worried Deep Neural Network (WDNN) model with transfer learning. Comparative analysis reveals that the proposed WDNN model outperforms by using three pre-training models: InceptionV3, ResNet50, and VGG19 in terms of various performance metrics. Due to the shortage of COVID-19 data set, data augmentation was used to increase the number of images in the positive class, then normalization used to make all images have the same size. Experimentation is done on COVID-19 dataset collected from different cases with total 2623 where (1573 training, 524 validation, 524 test). Our proposed model achieved 99,046, 98,684, 99,119, 98,90 in terms of accuracy, precision, recall, F-score, respectively. The results are compared with both the traditional machine learning methods and those using Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs). The results demonstrate the ability of our classification model to use as an alternative of the current diagnostic tool.