Automatic Detection of Coronavirus Disease (COVID-19) Using X-ray Images and Deep Convolutional Neural Networks

The 2019 novel coronavirus disease (COVID-19), with a starting point in China, has spread rapidly among people living in other countries, and is approaching approximately 34,986,502 cases worldwide according to the statistics of European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control. There are a limited number of COVID-19 test kits available in hospitals due to the increasing cases daily. Therefore, it is necessary to implement an automatic detection system as a quick alternative diagnosis option to prevent COVID-19 spreading among people. In this study, five pre-trained convolutional neural network based models (ResNet50, ResNet101, ResNet152, InceptionV3 and Inception-ResNetV2) have been proposed for the detection of coronavirus pneumonia infected patient using chest X-ray radiographs. We have implemented three different binary classifications with four classes (COVID-19, normal (healthy), viral pneumonia and bacterial pneumonia) by using 5-fold cross validation. Considering the performance results obtained, it has seen that the pre-trained ResNet50 model provides the highest classification performance (96.1% accuracy for Dataset-1, 99.5% accuracy for Dataset-2 and 99.7% accuracy for Dataset-3) among other four used models.