A Novel Approach to Detect COVID-19: Enhanced Deep Learning Models with Convolutional Neural Networks

The novel coronavirus (COVID-19) is a contagious viral disease that has rapidly spread worldwide since December 2019, causing the disruption of life and heavy economic losses. Since the beginning of the virus outbreak, a polymerase chain reaction has been used to detect the virus. However, since it is an expensive and slow method, artificial intelligence researchers have attempted to develop quick, inexpensive alternative methods of diagnosis to help doctors identify positive cases. Therefore, researchers are starting to incorporate chest X-ray scans (CXRs), an easy and inexpensive examination method. This study used an approach that uses image cropping methods and a deep learning technique (updated VGG16 model) to classify three public datasets. This study had four main steps. First, the data were split into training and testing sets (70% and 30%, respectively). Second, in the image processing step, each image was cropped to show only the chest area. The images were then resized to 150 x 150. The third step was to build an updated VGG16 convolutional neural network (VGG16-CNN) model using multiple classifications (three classes: COVID-19, normal, and pneumonia) and binary classification (COVID-19 and normal). The fourth step was to evaluate the model's performance using accuracy, sensitivity, and specificity. This study obtained 97.50% accuracy for multiple classifications and 99.76% for binary classification. The study also got the best COVID-19 classification accuracy (99%) for both models. It can be considered that the scientific contribution of this research is summarized as: the VGG16 model was reduced from approximately 138 million parameters to around 40 million parameters. Further, it was tested on three different datasets and proved highly efficient in performance.