CheXImageNet: a novel architecture for accurate classification of Covid-19 with chest x-ray digital images using deep convolutional neural networks

Many countries around the world have been influenced by Covid-19 which is a serious virus as it gets transmitted by human communication. Although, its syndrome is quite similar to the ordinary flu. The critical step involved in Covid-19 is the initial screening or testing of the infected patients. As there are no special detection tools, the demand for such diagnostic tools has been increasing continuously. So, it is eminently admissible to find out positive cases of this disease at the earliest so that the spreading of this dangerous virus can be controlled. Although, some methods for the detection of Covid-19 patients are available, which are performed upon respiratory based samples and among them, a critical approach for treatment is radiologic imaging or X-ray imaging. The latest conclusions obtained from X-ray digital imaging based algorithms and techniques recommend that such type of digital images may consist of significant facts regarding the SARS-CoV-2 virus. The utilization of Deep Neural Networks based methodologies clubbed with digital radiological imaging has been proved useful for accurately identifying this disease. This could also be adjuvant in conquering the problem of dearth of competent physicians in far-flung areas. In this paper, a CheXImageNet model has been introduced for detecting Covid-19 disease by using digital images of Chest X-ray with the help of an openly accessible dataset. Experiments for both binary class and multi-class have been performed in this work for benchmarking the effectiveness of the proposed work. An accuracy of 100% is reported for both binary classification (having cases of Covid-19 and Normal X-Ray) and classification for three classes (including cases of Covid-19, Normal X-Ray and, cases of Pneumonia disease) respectively.