COVID-19 classification based on a deep learning and machine learning fusion technique using chest CT images

Coronavirus disease (COVID-19), impacted by SARS-CoV-2, is one of the greatest challenges of the twenty-first century. COVID-19 broke out in the world over the last 2 years and has caused many injuries and killed persons. Computer-aided diagnosis has become a necessary tool to prevent the spreading of this virus. Detecting COVID-19 at an early stage is essential to reduce the mortality risk of patients. Researchers seek to find rapid solutions based on techniques of Machine Learning and Deep Learning. In this paper, we introduced a hybrid model for COVID-19 detection based on machine learning and deep learning models. We used 10 different deep CNN network models to extract features from CT images. We extract features from different layers in each network and find the optimum layer that gives the best-extracted features for each CNN network. Then, for classifying these features, we used five different classifiers based on machine learning. The dataset consists of 2481 CT images divided into COVID-19 and non-COVID-19 categories. Three folds are extracted with a different size between testing and training. Through experiments, we define the best layer for all used CNN networks, the best network, and the best-used classifier. The measured performance shows the superiority of the proposed system over the literature with a highest accuracy of 99.39%. Our models are tested with the three folds that gained maximum average accuracy. The result is 98.69%.