AI_COVID: AUTOMATIC DIAGNOSIS OF COVID-19 USING FRONTAL CHEST X-RAY IMAGE

Abstract. With the continued growth of confirmed cases of COVID-19, a highly infectious disease caused by a newly discovered coronavirus called Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus 2, or SARS-CoV-2, there is an urgent need to find ways to help clinicians fight the virus by reducing the workload and speeding up the diagnosis of COVID-19. In this work, we propose an artificial intelligence solution “AI_COVID” which can help radiologists to know if the lungs are infected with the virus in just a few seconds.

AI_COVID is based on a pre-trained DenseNet-121 model that detects subtle changes in the lungs and an SVM classifier that decides whether these changes are caused by COVID-19 or other diseases. AI_COVID is trained on thousands of frontal chest x-rays of people who have contracted COVID-19, healthy people, and people with viral or bacterial pneumonia. The experimental study is tested on 781 chest x-rays from two publicly available chest x-ray datasets COVID-19 radiography database and COVIDx Dataset. The performance results showed that our proposed model (DenseNet-121 + SVM) demonstrated high performance and yielded excellent results compared to the current methods in the literature, with a total accuracy of 99.74% and 98.85% for binary classification (COVID-19 vs. No COVID-19) and multi-class classification (COVID-19 vs. Normal vs. Pneumonia), respectively.