An Efficient CNN-Based Hybrid Classification and Segmentation Approach for COVID-19 Detection

COVID-19 remains to proliferate precipitously in the world. It has significantly influenced public health, the world economy, and the persons’ lives. Hence, there is a need to speed up the diagnosis and precautions to deal with COVID-19 patients. With this explosion of this pandemic, there is a need for automated diagnosis tools to help specialists based on medical images. This paper presents a hybrid Convolutional Neural Network (CNN)-based classification and segmentation approach for COVID-19 detection from Computed Tomography (CT) images. The proposed approach is employed to classify and segment the COVID-19, pneumonia, and normal CT images. The classification stage is firstly applied to detect and classify the input medical CT images. Then, the segmentation stage is performed to distinguish between pneumonia and COVID-19 CT images. The classification stage is implemented based on a simple and efficient CNN deep learning model. This model comprises four Rectified Linear Units (ReLUs), four batch normalization layers, and four convolutional (Conv) layers. The Conv layer depends on filters with sizes of 64, 32, 16, and 8. A 2 × 2 window and a stride of 2 are employed in the utilized four max-pooling layers. A soft-max activation function and a Fully-Connected (FC) layer are utilized in the classification stage to perform the detection process. For the segmentation process, the Simplified Pulse Coupled Neural Network (SPCNN) is utilized in the proposed hybrid approach. The proposed segmentation approach is based on salient object detection to localize the COVID-19 or pneumonia region, accurately. To summarize the contributions of the paper, we can say that the classification process with a CNN model can be the first stage a highly-effective automated diagnosis system. Once the images are accepted by the system, it is possible to perform further processing through a segmentation process to isolate the regions of interest in the images. The region of interest can be assesses both automatically and through experts. This strategy helps so much in saving the time and efforts of specialists with the explosion of COVID-19 pandemic in the world. The proposed classification approach is applied for different scenarios of 80%, 70%, or 60% of the data for training and 20%, 30, or 40% of the data for testing, respectively. In these scenarios, the proposed approach achieves classification accuracies of 100%, 99.45%, and 98.55%, respectively. Thus, the obtained results demonstrate and prove the efficacy of the proposed approach for assisting the specialists in automated medical diagnosis services.     

Efficient Deep CNN Model for COVID-19 Classification

Coronavirus (COVID-19) infection was initially acknowledged as a global pandemic in Wuhan in China. World Health Organization (WHO) stated that the COVID-19 is an epidemic that causes a 3.4% death rate. Chest X-Ray (CXR) and Computerized Tomography (CT) screening of infected persons are essential in diagnosis applications. There are numerous ways to identify positive COVID-19 cases. One of the fundamental ways is radiology imaging through CXR, or CT images. The comparison of CT and CXR scans revealed that CT scans are more effective in the diagnosis process due to their high quality. Hence, automated classification techniques are required to facilitate the diagnosis process. Deep Learning (DL) is an effective tool that can be utilized for detection and classification this type of medical images. The deep Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) can learn and extract essential features from different medical image datasets. In this paper, a CNN architecture for automated COVID-19 detection from CXR and CT images is offered. Three activation functions as well as three optimizers are tested and compared for this task. The proposed architecture is built from scratch and the COVID-19 image datasets are directly fed to train it. The performance is tested and investigated on the CT and CXR datasets. Three activation functions: Tanh, Sigmoid, and ReLU are compared using a constant learning rate and different batch sizes. Different optimizers are studied with different batch sizes and a constant learning rate. Finally, a comparison between different combinations of activation functions and optimizers is presented, and the optimal configuration is determined. Hence, the main objective is to improve the detection accuracy of COVID-19 from CXR and CT images using DL by employing CNNs to classify medical COVID-19 images in an early stage. The proposed model achieves a classification accuracy of 91.67% on CXR image dataset, and a classification accuracy of 100% on CT dataset with training times of 58 min and 46 min on CXR and CT datasets, respectively. The best results are obtained using the ReLU activation function combined with the SGDM optimizer at a learning rate of 10⁻⁵ and a minibatch size of 16.     

Developing a Recognition System for Classifying COVID-19 Using a Convolutional Neural Network Algorithm

The COVID-19 pandemic poses an additional serious public health threat due to little or no pre-existing human immunity, and developing a system to identify COVID-19 in its early stages will save millions of lives. This study applied support vector machine (SVM), k-nearest neighbor (K-NN) and deep learning convolutional neural network (CNN) algorithms to classify and detect COVID-19 using chest X-ray radiographs. To test the proposed system, chest X-ray radiographs and CT images were collected from different standard databases, which contained 95 normal images, 140 COVID-19 images and 10 SARS images. Two scenarios were considered to develop a system for predicting COVID-19. In the first scenario, the Gaussian filter was applied to remove noise from the chest X-ray radiograph images, and then the adaptive region growing technique was used to segment the region of interest from the chest X-ray radiographs. After segmentation, a hybrid feature extraction composed of 2D-DWT and gray level co-occurrence matrix was utilized to extract the features significant for detecting COVID-19. These features were processed using SVM and K-NN. In the second scenario, a CNN transfer model (ResNet 50) was used to detect COVID-19. The system was examined and evaluated through multiclass statistical analysis, and the empirical results of the analysis found significant values of 97.14%, 99.34%, 99.26%, 99.26% and 99.40% for accuracy, specificity, sensitivity, recall and AUC, respectively. Thus, the CNN model showed significant success; it achieved optimal accuracy, effectiveness and robustness for detecting COVID-19.     

Deep Learning ResNet101 Deep Features of Portable Chest X-Ray Accurately Classify COVID-19 Lung Infection

This study is designed to develop Artificial Intelligence (AI) based analysis tool that could accurately detect COVID-19 lung infections based on portable chest x-rays (CXRs). The frontline physicians and radiologists suffer from grand challenges for COVID-19 pandemic due to the suboptimal image quality and the large volume of CXRs. In this study, AI-based analysis tools were developed that can precisely classify COVID-19 lung infection. Publicly available datasets of COVID-19 (N = 1525), non-COVID-19 normal (N = 1525), viral pneumonia (N = 1342) and bacterial pneumonia (N = 2521) from the Italian Society of Medical and Interventional Radiology (SIRM), Radiopaedia, The Cancer Imaging Archive (TCIA) and Kaggle repositories were taken. A multi-approach utilizing deep learning ResNet101 with and without hyperparameters optimization was employed. Additionally, the features extracted from the average pooling layer of ResNet101 were used as input to machine learning (ML) algorithms, which twice trained the learning algorithms. The ResNet101 with optimized parameters yielded improved performance to default parameters. The extracted features from ResNet101 are fed to the k-nearest neighbor (KNN) and support vector machine (SVM) yielded the highest 3-class classification performance of 99.86% and 99.46%, respectively. The results indicate that the proposed approach can be better utilized for improving the accuracy and diagnostic efficiency of CXRs. The proposed deep learning model has the potential to improve further the efficiency of the healthcare systems for proper diagnosis and prognosis of COVID-19 lung infection.     

Lightweight Transfer Learning Models for Ultrasound-Guided Classification of COVID-19 Patients

Lightweight deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs) present a good solution to achieve fast and accurate image-guided diagnostic procedures of COVID-19 patients. Recently, advantages of portable Ultrasound (US) imaging such as simplicity and safe procedures have attracted many radiologists for scanning suspected COVID-19 cases. In this paper, a new framework of lightweight deep learning classifiers, namely COVID-LWNet is proposed to identify COVID-19 and pneumonia abnormalities in US images. Compared to traditional deep learning models, lightweight CNNs showed significant performance of real-time vision applications by using mobile devices with limited hardware resources. Four main lightweight deep learning models, namely MobileNets, ShuffleNets, MENet and MnasNet have been proposed to identify the health status of lungs using US images. Public image dataset (POCUS) was used to validate our proposed COVID-LWNet framework successfully. Three classes of infectious COVID-19, bacterial pneumonia, and the healthy lung were investigated in this study. The results showed that the performance of our proposed MnasNet classifier achieved the best accuracy score and shortest training time of 99.0% and 647.0 s, respectively. This paper demonstrates the feasibility of using our proposed COVID-LWNet framework as a new mobile-based radiological tool for clinical diagnosis of COVID-19 and other lung diseases.     

COVID-19 Infected Lung Computed Tomography Segmentation and Supervised Classification Approach

The purpose of this research is the segmentation of lungs computed tomography (CT) scan for the diagnosis of COVID-19 by using machine learning methods. Our dataset contains data from patients who are prone to the epidemic. It contains three types of lungs CT images (Normal, Pneumonia, and COVID-19) collected from two different sources; the first one is the Radiology Department of Nishtar Hospital Multan and Civil Hospital Bahawalpur, Pakistan, and the second one is a publicly free available medical imaging database known as Radiopaedia. For the preprocessing, a novel fuzzy c-mean automated region-growing segmentation approach is deployed to take an automated region of interest (ROIs) and acquire 52 hybrid statistical features for each ROIs. Also, 12 optimized statistical features are selected via the chi-square feature reduction technique. For the classification, five machine learning classifiers named as deep learning J4, multilayer perceptron, support vector machine, random forest, and naive Bayes are deployed to optimize the hybrid statistical features dataset. It is observed that the deep learning J4 has promising results (sensitivity and specificity: 0.987; accuracy: 98.67%) among all the deployed classifiers. As a complementary study, a statistical work is devoted to the use of a new statistical model to fit the main datasets of COVID-19 collected in Pakistan.     

Automatic Detection of COVID-19 Using a Stacked Denoising Convolutional Autoencoder

The exponential increase in new coronavirus disease 2019 ({COVID-19}) cases and deaths has made COVID-19 the leading cause of death in many countries. Thus, in this study, we propose an efficient technique for the automatic detection of COVID-19 and pneumonia based on X-ray images. A stacked denoising convolutional autoencoder (SDCA) model was proposed to classify X-ray images into three classes: normal, pneumonia, and {COVID-19}. The SDCA model was used to obtain a good representation of the input data and extract the relevant features from noisy images. The proposed model’s architecture mainly composed of eight autoencoders, which were fed to two dense layers and SoftMax classifiers. The proposed model was evaluated with 6356 images from the datasets from different sources. The experiments and evaluation of the proposed model were applied to an 80/20 training/validation split and for five cross-validation data splitting, respectively. The metrics used for the SDCA model were the classification accuracy, precision, sensitivity, and specificity for both schemes. Our results demonstrated the superiority of the proposed model in classifying X-ray images with high accuracy of 96.8%. Therefore, this model can help physicians accelerate COVID-19 diagnosis.     

Deep Optimal VGG16 Based COVID-19 Diagnosis Model

Coronavirus (COVID-19) outbreak was first identified in Wuhan, China in December 2019. It was tagged as a pandemic soon by the WHO being a serious public medical condition worldwide. In spite of the fact that the virus can be diagnosed by qRT-PCR, COVID-19 patients who are affected with pneumonia and other severe complications can only be diagnosed with the help of Chest X-Ray (CXR) and Computed Tomography (CT) images. In this paper, the researchers propose to detect the presence of COVID-19 through images using Best deep learning model with various features. Impressive features like Speeded-Up Robust Features (SURF), Features from Accelerated Segment Test (FAST) and Scale-Invariant Feature Transform (SIFT) are used in the test images to detect the presence of virus. The optimal features are extracted from the images utilizing DeVGGCovNet (Deep optimal VGG16) model through optimal learning rate. This task is accomplished by exceptional mating conduct of Black Widow spiders. In this strategy, cannibalism is incorporated. During this phase, fitness outcomes are rejected and are not satisfied by the proposed model. The results acquired from real case analysis demonstrate the viability of DeVGGCovNet technique in settling true issues using obscure and testing spaces. VGG 16 model identifies the image which has a place with which it is dependent on the distinctions in images. The impact of the distinctions on labels during training stage is studied and predicted for test images. The proposed model was compared with existing state-of-the-art models and the results from the proposed model for disarray grid estimates like Sen, Spec, Accuracy and F1 score were promising.     

Deep Rank-Based Average Pooling Network for Covid-19 Recognition

(Aim) To make a more accurate and precise COVID-19 diagnosis system, this study proposed a novel deep rank-based average pooling network (DRAPNet) model, i.e., deep rank-based average pooling network, for COVID-19 recognition. (Methods) 521 subjects yield 1164 slice images via the slice level selection method. All the 1164 slice images comprise four categories: COVID-19 positive; community-acquired pneumonia; second pulmonary tuberculosis; and healthy control. Our method firstly introduced an improved multiple-way data augmentation. Secondly, an n-conv rank-based average pooling module (NRAPM) was proposed in which rank-based pooling—particularly, rank-based average pooling (RAP)—was employed to avoid overfitting. Third, a novel DRAPNet was proposed based on NRAPM and inspired by the VGG network. Grad-CAM was used to generate heatmaps and gave our AI model an explainable analysis. (Results) Our DRAPNet achieved a micro-averaged F1 score of 95.49% by 10 runs over the test set. The sensitivities of the four classes were 95.44%, 96.07%, 94.41%, and 96.07%, respectively. The precisions of four classes were 96.45%, 95.22%, 95.05%, and 95.28%, respectively. The F1 scores of the four classes were 95.94%, 95.64%, 94.73%, and 95.67%, respectively. Besides, the confusion matrix was given. (Conclusions) The DRAPNet is effective in diagnosing COVID-19 and other chest infectious diseases. The RAP gives better results than four other methods: strided convolution, l₂-norm pooling, average pooling, and max pooling.     

Residual Feature Attentional Fusion Network for Lightweight Chest CT Image Super-Resolution

The diagnosis of COVID-19 requires chest computed tomography (CT). High-resolution CT images can provide more diagnostic information to help doctors better diagnose the disease, so it is of clinical importance to study super-resolution (SR) algorithms applied to CT images to improve the resolution of CT images. However, most of the existing SR algorithms are studied based on natural images, which are not suitable for medical images; and most of these algorithms improve the reconstruction quality by increasing the network depth, which is not suitable for machines with limited resources. To alleviate these issues, we propose a residual feature attentional fusion network for lightweight chest CT image super-resolution (RFAFN). Specifically, we design a contextual feature extraction block (CFEB) that can extract CT image features more efficiently and accurately than ordinary residual blocks. In addition, we propose a feature-weighted cascading strategy (FWCS) based on attentional feature fusion blocks (AFFB) to utilize the high-frequency detail information extracted by CFEB as much as possible via selectively fusing adjacent level feature information. Finally, we suggest a global hierarchical feature fusion strategy (GHFFS), which can utilize the hierarchical features more effectively than dense concatenation by progressively aggregating the feature information at various levels. Numerous experiments show that our method performs better than most of the state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods on the COVID-19 chest CT dataset. In detail, the peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR) is 0.11 dB and 0.47 dB higher on CTtest1 and CTtest2 at SR compared to the suboptimal method, but the number of parameters and multi-adds are reduced by 22K and 0.43G, respectively. Our method can better recover chest CT image quality with fewer computational resources and effectively assist in COVID-19.     

IoT & AI Enabled Three-Phase Secure and Non-Invasive COVID 19 Diagnosis System

Corona is a viral disease that has taken the form of an epidemic and is causing havoc worldwide after its first appearance in the Wuhan state of China in December 2019. Due to the similarity in initial symptoms with viral fever, it is challenging to identify this virus initially. Non-detection of this virus at the early stage results in the death of the patient. Developing and densely populated countries face a scarcity of resources like hospitals, ventilators, oxygen, and healthcare workers. Technologies like the Internet of Things (IoT) and artificial intelligence can play a vital role in diagnosing the COVID-19 virus at an early stage. To minimize the spread of the pandemic, IoT-enabled devices can be used to collect patient’s data remotely in a secure manner. Collected data can be analyzed through a deep learning model to detect the presence of the COVID-19 virus. In this work, the authors have proposed a three-phase model to diagnose covid-19 by incorporating a chatbot, IoT, and deep learning technology. In phase one, an artificially assisted chatbot can guide an individual by asking about some common symptoms. In case of detection of even a single sign, the second phase of diagnosis can be considered, consisting of using a thermal scanner and pulse oximeter. In case of high temperature and low oxygen saturation levels, the third phase of diagnosis will be recommended, where chest radiography images can be analyzed through an AI-based model to diagnose the presence of the COVID-19 virus in the human body. The proposed model reduces human intervention through chatbot-based initial screening, sensor-based IoT devices, and deep learning-based X-ray analysis. It also helps in reducing the mortality rate by detecting the presence of the COVID-19 virus at an early stage.     

On the Detection of COVID-19 from Chest X-Ray Images Using CNN-Based Transfer Learning

Coronavirus disease (COVID-19) is an extremely infectious disease and possibly causes acute respiratory distress or in severe cases may lead to death. There has already been some research in dealing with coronavirus using machine learning algorithms, but few have presented a truly comprehensive view. In this research, we show how convolutional neural network (CNN) can be useful to detect COVID-19 using chest X-ray images. We leverage the CNN-based pre-trained models as feature extractors to substantiate transfer learning and add our own classifier in detecting COVID-19. In this regard, we evaluate performance of five different pre-trained models with fine-tuning the weights from some of the top layers. We also develop an ensemble model where the predictions from all chosen pre-trained models are combined to generate a single output. The models are evaluated through 5-fold cross validation using two publicly available data repositories containing healthy and infected (both COVID-19 and other pneumonia) chest X-ray images. We also leverage two different visualization techniques to observe how efficiently the models extract important features related to the detection of COVID- 19 patients. The models show high degree of accuracy, precision, and sensitivity. We believe that the models will aid medical professionals with improved and faster patient screening and pave a way to further COVID-19 research.     

Classification COVID-19 Based on Enhancement X-Ray Images and Low Complexity Model

COVID-19 has been considered one of the recent epidemics that occurred at the last of 2019 and the beginning of 2020 that world widespread. This spread of COVID-19 requires a fast technique for diagnosis to make the appropriate decision for the treatment. X-ray images are one of the most classifiable images that are used widely in diagnosing patients’ data depending on radiographs due to their structures and tissues that could be classified. Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) is the most accurate classification technique used to diagnose COVID-19 because of the ability to use a different number of convolutional layers and its high classification accuracy. Classification using CNNs techniques requires a large number of images to learn and obtain satisfactory results. In this paper, we used SqueezNet with a modified output layer to classify X-ray images into three groups: COVID-19, normal, and pneumonia. In this study, we propose a deep learning method with enhance the features of X-ray images collected from Kaggle, Figshare to distinguish between COVID-19, Normal, and Pneumonia infection. In this regard, several techniques were used on the selected image samples which are Unsharp filter, Histogram equal, and Complement image to produce another view of the dataset. The Squeeze Net CNN model has been tested in two scenarios using the 13,437 X-ray images that include 4479 for each type (COVID-19, Normal and Pneumonia). In the first scenario, the model has been tested without any enhancement on the datasets. It achieved an accuracy of 91%. But, in the second scenario, the model was tested using the same previous images after being improved by several techniques and the performance was high at approximately 95%. The conclusion of this study is the used model gives higher accuracy results for enhanced images compared with the accuracy results for the original images. A comparison of the outcomes demonstrated the effectiveness of our DL method for classifying COVID-19 based on enhanced X-ray images.     

A Deep Learning Approach for Detecting Covid-19 Using the Chest X-RayImages

Real-time detection of Covid-19 has definitely been the most widely-used world-wide classification problem since the start of the pandemic from 2020 until now. In the meantime, airspace opacities spreads related to lung have been of the most challenging problems in this area. A common approach to do on that score has been using chest X-ray images to better diagnose positive Covid-19 cases. Similar to most other classification problems, machine learning-based approaches have been the first/most-used candidates in this application. Many schemes based on machine/deep learning have been proposed in recent years though increasing the performance and accuracy of the system has still remained an open issue. In this paper, we develop a novel deep learning architecture to better classify the Covid-19 X-ray images. To do so, we first propose a novel multi-habitat migration artificial bee colony (MHMABC) algorithm to improve the exploitation/exploration of artificial bee colony (ABC) algorithm. After that, we optimally train the fully connected by using the proposed MHMABC algorithm to obtain better accuracy and convergence rate while reducing the execution cost. Our experiment results on Covid-19 X-ray image dataset show that the proposed deep architecture has a great performance in different important optimization parameters. Furthermore, it will be shown that the MHMABC algorithm outperforms the state-of-the-art algorithms by evaluating its performance using some well-known benchmark datasets.     

Compatible abnormality detection technique for CT and MRI brain images

Abstract

An automated computerised tomography (CT) and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) brain images are used to perform an efficient classification. The proposed technique consists of three stages, namely, pre-processing, feature extraction and classification. Initially, pre-processing is performed to remove the noise from the medical MRI images. Then, in the feature extraction stage, the features that are related with MRI and CT images are extracted and these extracted features which are given to the Feed Forward Back-propagation Neural Network (FFBNN) is exploited in order to classify the brain MRI and CT images into two types: normal and abnormal. The FFBNN is well trained by the extracted features and uses the unknown medical brain MRI images for classification in order to achieve better classification performance. The proposed method is validated by various MRI and CT scan images. A classification with an accomplishment of 96% and 70% has been obtained by the proposed FFBNN classifier. This achievement shows the effectiveness of the proposed brain image classification technique when compared with other recent research works.