Hybrid deep neural network for automatic detection of COVID‐19 using chest x‐ray images

Abstract

The 2019 coronavirus (COVID‐19), started in China, spreads rapidly around the entire world. In automated medical imagery diagnostic technique, due to presence of noise in medical images and use of single pre‐trained model on low quality images, the existing deep network models cannot provide the optimal results with better accuracy. Hence, hybrid deep learning model of Xception model & Resnet50V2 model is proposed in this paper. This study suggests classifying X‐ray images into three categories namely, normal, bacterial/viral infections and Covid positive. It utilizes CLAHE & BM3D techniques to improve visual clarity and reduce noise. Transfer learning method with variety of pre‐trained models such as ResNet‐50, Inception V3, VGG‐16, VGG‐19, ResNet50V2, and Xception are used for better feature extraction and Chest X‐ray image classification. The overfitting issue were resolved using K‐fold cross validation. The proposed hybrid deep learning model results high accuracy of 97.8% which is better than existing techniques.