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.