COVID-19 Detection from Chest X-ray Images using CNNs Models: Further Evidence from Deep Transfer Learning
Mohamed Samir Boudrioua
Abstract
Introduction: The early automatic diagnosis of the novel coronavirus (COVID-19) disease could be very helpful to reduce its spread around the world. In this study, we revisit the identification of COVID-19 from chest X-ray images using deep learning. Methods: We collected a relatively large COVID-19 dataset—compared with previous studies—containing 309 real COVID-19 chest X-ray images. We also prepared 2,000 chest X-ray images of pneumonia cases and 1,000 images of healthy controls. Deep transfer learning was used to detect abnormalities in our image dataset. We fine-tuned three, pre-trained convolutional neural network (CNN) models on a training dataset: DenseNet 121, NASNetLarge, and NASNet-Mobile. Results: The evaluation of our models on a test dataset showed that these models achieved an average sensitivity rate of approximately 99.45% and an average specificity rate of approximately 99.5%. Conclusion: A larger dataset of COVID-19 X-ray images could lead to more accurate and reliable identification of COVID-19 infections using deep transfer learning. However, the clinical diagnosis of COVID-19 disease is always necessary.