Automated COVID-19 Detection from Chest X-Ray Images: A High-Resolution Network (HRNet) Approach

The pandemic, originated by novel coronavirus 2019 (COVID-19), continuing its devastating effect on the health, well-being, and economy of the global population. A critical step to restrain this pandemic is the early detection of COVID-19 in the human body to constraint the exposure and control the spread of the virus. Chest X-Rays are one of the non-invasive tools to detect this disease as the manual PCR diagnosis process is quite tedious and time-consuming. Our intensive background studies show that, the works till now are not efficient to produce an unbiased detection result. In this work, we proposed an automated COVID-19 classification method, utilizing available COVID and non-COVID X-Ray datasets, along with High-Resolution Network (HRNet) for feature extraction embedding with the UNet for segmentation purposes. To evaluate the proposed method, several baseline experiments have been performed employing numerous deep learning architectures. With extensive experiment, we got a significant result of 99.26% accuracy, 98.53% sensitivity, and 98.82% specificity with HRNet which surpasses the performances of the existing models. Finally, we conclude that our proposed methodology ensures unbiased high accuracy, which increases the probability of incorporating X-Ray images into the diagnosis of the disease. © 2021, The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd.