Applied Sciences (Nov 2021)

An Effective Convolutional Neural Network Model for the Early Detection of COVID-19 Using Chest X-ray Images

  • Muhammad Shoaib Farooq,
  • Attique Ur Rehman,
  • Muhammad Idrees,
  • Muhammad Ahsan Raza,
  • Jehad Ali,
  • Mehedi Masud,
  • Jehad F. Al-Amri,
  • Syed Hasnain Raza Kazmi

DOI
https://doi.org/10.3390/app112110301
Journal volume & issue
Vol. 11, no. 21
p. 10301

Abstract

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COVID-19 has been difficult to diagnose and treat at an early stage all over the world. The numbers of patients showing symptoms for COVID-19 have caused medical facilities at hospitals to become unavailable or overcrowded, which is a major challenge. Studies have recently allowed us to determine that COVID-19 can be diagnosed with the aid of chest X-ray images. To combat the COVID-19 outbreak, developing a deep learning (DL) based model for automated COVID-19 diagnosis on chest X-ray is beneficial. In this research, we have proposed a customized convolutional neural network (CNN) model to detect COVID-19 from chest X-ray images. The model is based on nine layers which uses a binary classification method to differentiate between COVID-19 and normal chest X-rays. It provides COVID-19 detection early so the patients can be admitted in a timely fashion. The proposed model was trained and tested on two publicly available datasets. Cross-dataset studies are used to assess the robustness in a real-world context. Six hundred X-ray images were used for training and two hundred X-rays were used for validation of the model. The X-ray images of the dataset were preprocessed to improve the results and visualized for better analysis. The developed algorithm reached 98% precision, recall and f1-score. The cross-dataset studies also demonstrate the resilience of deep learning algorithms in a real-world context with 98.5 percent accuracy. Furthermore, a comparison table was created which shows that our proposed model outperforms other relative models in terms of accuracy. The quick and high-performance of our proposed DL-based customized model identifies COVID-19 patients quickly, which is helpful in controlling the COVID-19 outbreak.

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