A Convolutional Neural Network Model for Detection of COVID -19 Disease and Pneumonia

Abstract

Introduction: COVID -19 has had a devastating impact on public health around the world. Since early diagnosis and timely treatment have an impact on reducing mortality due to infection with COVID -19 and existing diagnostic methods such as RT -PCR test are prone to error, the alternative solution is to use artificial intelligence and image processing techniques. The overall goal is to introduce an intelligent model based on deep learning and convolutional neural network to identify cases of COVID -19 and pneumonia for the purpose of subsequent treatment measures with the help of lung medical images. Method: The proposed model includes two datasets of radiography and CT -scan. These dataset s are pre - processed and the data enhancement process is applied to the images. In the next step, three architectures EfficientNetB4, InceptionV3 , and InceptionResNetV2 are used using transfer learning method. Results: The best result obtained for CT -scan images belongs to the InceptionResNetV2 architecture with an accuracy of 99.366% and for radiology images related to the InceptionV3 architecture with an accuracy of 96.943%. In addition, the results indicate that CT -scan images have more features than radiographic images, and disease diagnosis is performed more accurately on this type of data. Conclusion: The proposed model based on a convolutional neural network has higher accuracy than other similar models. Also, this method by generating instant results can help in the initial evaluation of patients in medical centers, especially during the peak of epidemics, when medical centers face various challenges , such as lacking specialists and medical staffs .