No abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic continues to severely undermine the prosperity of the global health system. To combat this pandemic, effective screening techniques for infected patients are indispensable. There is no doubt that the use of chest X-ray images for radiological assessment is one of the essential screening techniques. Some of the early studies revealed that the patient’s chest X-ray images showed abnormalities, which is natural for patients infected with COVID-19. In this paper, we proposed a parallel-dilated convolutional neural network (CNN) based COVID-19 detection system from chest X-ray images, named as Parallel-Dilated COVIDNet (PDCOVIDNet). First, the publicly available chest X-ray collection fully preloaded and enhanced, and then classified by the proposed method. Differing convolution dilation rate in a parallel form demonstrates the proof-of-principle for using PDCOVIDNet to extract radiological features for COVID-19 detection. Accordingly, we have assisted our method with two visualization methods, which are specifically designed to increase understanding of the key components associated with COVID-19 infection. Both visualization methods compute gradients for a given image category related to feature maps of the last convolutional layer to create a class-discriminative region. In our experiment, we used a total of 2905 chest X-ray images, comprising three cases (such as COVID-19, normal, and viral pneumonia), and empirical evaluations revealed that the proposed method extracted more significant features expeditiously related to suspected disease. The experimental results demonstrate that our proposed method significantly improves performance metrics: the accuracy, precision, recall and F1 scores reach , , and , respectively, which is comparable or enhanced compared with the state-of-the-art methods. We believe that our contribution can support resistance to COVID-19, and will adopt for COVID-19 screening in AI-based systems.

The goal of this research is to develop and implement a highly effective deep learning model for detecting COVID-19. To achieve this goal, in this paper, we propose an ensemble of Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) based on EfficientNet, named ECOVNet, to detect COVID-19 from chest X-rays. To make the proposed model more robust, we have used one of the largest open-access chest X-ray data sets named COVIDx containing three classes—COVID-19, normal, and pneumonia. For feature extraction, we have applied an effective CNN structure, namely EfficientNet, with ImageNet pre-training weights. The generated features are transferred into custom fine-tuned top layers followed by a set of model snapshots. The predictions of the model snapshots (which are created during a single training) are consolidated through two ensemble strategies, i.e., hard ensemble and soft ensemble, to enhance classification performance. In addition, a visualization technique is incorporated to highlight areas that distinguish classes, thereby enhancing the understanding of primal components related to COVID-19. The results of our empirical evaluations show that the proposed ECOVNet model outperforms the state-of-the-art approaches and significantly improves detection performance with 100% recall for COVID-19 and overall accuracy of 96.07%. We believe that ECOVNet can enhance the detection of COVID-19 disease, and thus, underpin a fully automated and efficacious COVID-19 detection system.