COVID-19 detection on chest radiographs using feature fusion based deep learning

The year 2020 will certainly be remembered in human history as the year in which humans faced a global pandemic that drastically affected every living soul on planet earth. The COVID-19 pandemic certainly had a massive impact on human's social and daily lives. The economy and relations of all countries were also radically impacted. Due to such unexpected situations, healthcare systems either collapsed or failed under colossal pressure to cope with the overwhelming numbers of patients arriving at emergency rooms and intensive care units. The COVID -19 tests used for diagnosis were expensive, slow, and gave indecisive results. Unfortunately, such a hindered diagnosis of the infection prevented abrupt isolation of the infected people which, in turn, caused the rapid spread of the virus. In this paper, we proposed the use of cost-effective X-ray images in diagnosing COVID-19 patients. Compared to other imaging modalities, X-ray imaging is available in most healthcare units. Deep learning was used for feature extraction and classification by implementing a multi-stream convolutional neural network model. The model extracts and concatenates features from its three inputs, namely; grayscale, local binary patterns, and histograms of oriented gradients images. Extensive experiments using fivefold cross-validation were carried out on a publicly available X-ray database with 3886 images of three classes. Obtained results outperform the results of other algorithms with an accuracy of 97.76%. The results also show that the proposed model can make a significant contribution to the rapidly increasing workload in health systems with an artificial intelligence-based automatic diagnosis tool.