Can AI Help in Screening Viral and COVID-19 Pneumonia?

Abstract

Coronavirus disease (COVID-19) is a pandemic disease, which has already\ncaused thousands of causalities and infected several millions of people\nworldwide. Any technological tool enabling rapid screening of the COVID-19\ninfection with high accuracy can be crucially helpful to healthcare\nprofessionals. The main clinical tool currently in use for the diagnosis of\nCOVID-19 is the Reverse transcription polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR), which\nis expensive, less-sensitive and requires specialized medical personnel. X-ray\nimaging is an easily accessible tool that can be an excellent alternative in\nthe COVID-19 diagnosis. This research was taken to investigate the utility of\nartificial intelligence (AI) in the rapid and accurate detection of COVID-19\nfrom chest X-ray images. The aim of this paper is to propose a robust technique\nfor automatic detection of COVID-19 pneumonia from digital chest X-ray images\napplying pre-trained deep-learning algorithms while maximizing the detection\naccuracy. A public database was created by the authors combining several public\ndatabases and also by collecting images from recently published articles. The\ndatabase contains a mixture of 423 COVID-19, 1485 viral pneumonia, and 1579\nnormal chest X-ray images. Transfer learning technique was used with the help\nof image augmentation to train and validate several pre-trained deep\nConvolutional Neural Networks (CNNs). The networks were trained to classify two\ndifferent schemes: i) normal and COVID-19 pneumonia; ii) normal, viral and\nCOVID-19 pneumonia with and without image augmentation. The classification\naccuracy, precision, sensitivity, and specificity for both the schemes were\n99.7%, 99.7%, 99.7% and 99.55% and 97.9%, 97.95%, 97.9%, and 98.8%,\nrespectively.\n

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Affiliated Institutions

• University of Dhaka BD
• Qatar University QA
• University of Engineering and Technology Peshawar PK
• National University of Malaysia MY
• Bangladesh Medical University BD
• Hamad General Hospital QA
• North South University BD

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