Deep learning-based improved snapshot ensemble technique for COVID-19 chest X-ray classification

COVID-19 has proven to be a deadly virus, and unfortunately, it triggered a worldwide pandemic. Its detection for further treatment poses a severe threat to researchers, scientists, health professionals, and administrators worldwide. One of the daunting tasks during the pandemic for doctors in radiology is the use of chest X-ray or CT images for COVID-19 diagnosis. Time is required to inspect each report manually. While a CT scan is the better standard, an X-ray is still useful because it is cheaper, faster, and more widely used. To diagnose COVID-19, this paper proposes to use a deep learning-based improved Snapshot Ensemble technique for efficient COVID-19 chest X-ray classification. In addition, the proposed method takes advantage of the transfer learning technique using the ResNet-50 model, which is a pre-trained model. The proposed model uses the publicly accessible COVID-19 chest X-ray dataset consisting of 2905 images, which include COVID-19, viral pneumonia, and normal chest X-ray images. For performance evaluation, the model applied the metrics such as AU-ROC, AU-PR, and Jaccard Index. Furthermore, it also obtained a multi-class micro-average of 97% specificity, 95% f(1)-score, and 95% classification accuracy. The obtained results demonstrate that the performance of the proposed method outperformed those of several existing methods. This method appears to be a suitable and efficient approach for COVID-19 chest X-ray classification.