Paper accepted at XCOVNet: Chest X-ray Image Classification for COVID-19 Early Detection using convolutional Neural Networks

Authors: Vishu Madaan (Lovely Professional University, India), Aditya Roy (Lovely Professional University, India), Charu Gupta (Bhagwan Parashuram Institute of Technology, New Delhi, India), Prateek Agrawal (Institute of ITEC, University of Klagenfurt, Austria), Cristian Bologa (Babes-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca, Romania) and Radu Prodan (Institute of ITEC, University of Klagenfurt, Austria).

Abstract: COVID-19 (also known as SARS-COV-2) pandemic has spread in the entire world. It is a contagious disease that easily spreads from one person in direct contact to another, classified by experts in five categories: asymptomatic, mild, moderate, severe, and critical. Already more than 66 million people got infected worldwide with more than 22 million active patients as of 5 December 2020 and the rate is accelerating. More than 1.5 million patients (approximately 2.5% of total reported cases) across the world lost their life. In many places, the COVID-19 detection takes place through reverse transcription polymerase chain reaction (RTPCR) tests which may take longer than 48 hours. This is is one major reason of its severity and rapid spread. We propose in this paper a two-phase X-ray image classification called XCOVNet for early COVID-19 detection using convolutional neural Networks model. XCOVNet detects COVID-19 infections in chest X-ray patient images in two phases. The first phase pre-processes a dataset of 392 chest X-ray images of which half are COVID-19 positive and half are negative. The second phase trains and tunes the neural network model to achieve a 98.44% accuracy in patient classification.

Journal: New Generation Computing

Acknowledgement: This work is partially supported by ARTICONF