A deep learning framework to detect Covid-19 disease via chest X-ray and CT scan images

Abstract

COVID-19 disease has rapidly spread all over the world at the beginning of this year. The hospitals' reports have told that low sensitivity of RT-PCR tests in the infection early stage. At which point, a rapid and accurate diagnostic technique, is needed to detect the Covid-19. CT has been demonstrated to be a successful tool in the diagnosis of disease. A deep learning framework can be developed to aid in evaluating CT exams to provide diagnosis, thus saving time for disease control. In this work, a deep learning model was modified to Covid-19 detection via features extraction from chest X-ray and CT images. Initially, many transfer-learning models have applied and comparison it, then a VGG-19 model was tuned to get the best results that can be adopted in the disease diagnosis. Diagnostic performance was assessed for all models used via the dataset that included 1000 images. The VGG-19 model achieved the highest accuracy of 99%, sensitivity of 97.4%, and specificity of 99.4%. The deep learning and image processing demonstrated high performance in early Covid-19 detection. It shows to be an auxiliary detection way for clinical doctors and thus contribute to the control of the pandemic.