Pneumonia is an inflammation of the lung parenchyma that is caused by a variety of infectious microorganisms and non-infective agents. All age groups can be affected; however, in most cases, fragile groups are more susceptible than others. Radiological images such as Chest X-ray (CXR) images provide early detection and prompt action, where typical CXR for such a disease is characterized by radiopaque appearance or seemingly solid segment at the affected parts of the lung due to inflammatory exudate formation replacing the air in the alveoli. The early and accurate detection of pneumonia is crucial to avoid fatal ramifications, particularly in children and seniors. In this paper, we propose a novel 50 layers Convolutional Neural Network (CNN)-based architecture that outperforms the state-of-the-art models. The suggested framework is trained using 5852 CXR images and statistically tested using five-fold cross-validation. The model can distinguish between three classes: viz viral, bacterial, and normal; with 99.7% ± 0.2 accuracy, 99.74% ± 0.1 sensitivity, and 0.9812 Area Under the Curve (AUC). The results are promising, and the new architecture can be used to recognize pneumonia early with cost-effectiveness and high accuracy, especially in remote areas that lack proper access to expert radiologists, and therefore, reduces pneumonia-caused mortality rates.

The novel coronavirus (nCoV-19) was first detected in December 2019. It had spread worldwide and was declared coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic by March 2020. Patients presented with a wide range of symptoms affecting multiple organ systems predominantly the lungs. Severe cases required intensive care unit (ICU) admissions while there were asymptomatic cases as well. Although early detection of the COVID-19 virus by Real-time reverse transcription-polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR) is effective, it is not efficient; as there can be false negatives, it is time consuming and expensive. To increase the accuracy of in-vivo detection, radiological image-based methods like a simple chest X-ray (CXR) can be utilized. This reduces the false negatives as compared to solely using the RT-PCR technique. This paper employs various image processing techniques besides extracted texture features from the radiological images and feeds them to different artificial intelligence (AI) scenarios to distinguish between normal, pneumonia, and COVID-19 cases. The best scenario is then adopted to build an automated system that can segment the chest region from the acquired image, enhance the segmented region then extract the texture features, and finally, classify it into one of the three classes. The best overall accuracy achieved is 93.1% by exploiting Ensemble classifier. Utilizing radiological data to conform to a machine learning format reduces the detection time and increase the chances of survival.