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

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submitted on 2023-08-27, 07:40 and posted on 2023-09-19, 13:17 authored by Muhammad E. H. Chowdhury, Tawsifur Rahman, Amith Khandakar, Rashid Mazhar, Muhammad Abdul Kadir, Zaid Bin Mahbub, Khandakar Reajul Islam, Muhammad Salman Khan, Atif Iqbal, Nasser Al Emadi, Mamun Bin Ibne Reaz, Mohammad Tariqul Islam

Coronavirus disease (COVID-19) is a pandemic disease, which has already caused thousands of causalities and infected several millions of people worldwide. Any technological tool enabling rapid screening of the COVID-19 infection with high accuracy can be crucially helpful to the healthcare professionals. The main clinical tool currently in use for the diagnosis of COVID-19 is the Reverse transcription polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR), which is expensive, less-sensitive and requires specialized medical personnel. X-ray imaging is an easily accessible tool that can be an excellent alternative in the COVID-19 diagnosis. This research was taken to investigate the utility of artificial intelligence (AI) in the rapid and accurate detection of COVID-19 from chest X-ray images. The aim of this paper is to propose a robust technique for automatic detection of COVID-19 pneumonia from digital chest X-ray images applying pre-trained deep-learning algorithms while maximizing the detection accuracy. A public database was created by the authors combining several public databases and also by collecting images from recently published articles. The database contains a mixture of 423 COVID-19, 1485 viral pneumonia, and 1579 normal chest X-ray images. Transfer learning technique was used with the help of image augmentation to train and validate several pre-trained deep Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs). The networks were trained to classify two different schemes: i) normal and COVID-19 pneumonia; ii) normal, viral and COVID-19 pneumonia with and without image augmentation. The classification accuracy, precision, sensitivity, and specificity for both the schemes were 99.7%, 99.7%, 99.7% and 99.55% and 97.9%, 97.95%, 97.9%, and 98.8%, respectively. The high accuracy of this computer-aided diagnostic tool can significantly improve the speed and accuracy of COVID-19 diagnosis. This would be extremely useful in this pandemic where disease burden and need for preventive measures are at odds with available resources.

Other Information

Published in: IEEE Access
License: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
See article on publisher's website: https://dx.doi.org/10.1109/access.2020.3010287

Funding

Open Access funding provided by the Qatar National Library.

History

Language

  • English

Publisher

IEEE

Publication Year

  • 2020

License statement

This Item is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Institution affiliated with

  • Qatar University
  • College of Engineering - QU
  • Hamad Medical Corporation
  • Hamad General Hospital - HMC