Transfer learning for decision support in Covid-19 detection from a few images in big data

The novel coronavirus (Covid-19) has spread rapidly amongst countries all around the globe. Compared to the rise in cases, there are few Covid-19 testing kits available. Due to the lack of testing kits for the public, it is useful to implement an automated AI-based E-health decision support system as a potential alternative method for Covid-19 detection. As per medical examinations, the symptoms of Covid-19 could be somewhat analogous to those of pneumonia, though certainly not identical. Considering the enormous number of cases of Covid-19 and pneumonia, and the complexity of the related images stored, the data pertaining to this problem of automated detection constitutes big data. With rapid advancements in medical imaging, the development of intelligent predictive and diagnostic tools have also increased at a rapid rate. Data mining and machine learning techniques are widely accepted to aid medical diagnosis. In this paper, a huge data set of X-ray images from patients with common bacterial pneumonia, confirmed Covid-19 disease, and normal healthy cases are utilized for AI-based decision support in detecting the Coronavirus disease. The transfer learning approach, which enables us to learn from a smaller set of samples in a problem and transfer the discovered knowledge to a larger data set, is employed in this study. We consider transfer learning using three different models that are pre-trained on several images from the ImageNet source. The models deployed here are VGG16, VGG19, and ResNet101. The dataset is generated by gathering different classes of images. We present our approach and preliminary evaluation results in this paper. We also discuss applications and open issues.