An effective ensemble approach for classification of chest X-ray images having symptoms of COVID: A precautionary measure for the COVID-19 subvariants

Abstract

In recent years many people have died due to COVID-19 infection. The death rate increases due to the lack of proper diagnosis and treatment. It can be detected by RT-PCR test and from chest X-rays. Chest X-ray images can identify lung diseases such as COVID-19, viral pneumonia, and tuberculosis (TB). Because many illnesses share similar patterns and diagnoses, radiologists and clinicians find it challenging to distinguish between them. This study uses convolutional neural networks (CNN) and ensemble models (VGG-19, ResNet50, vision transformer) to analyze chest X-ray images from internet sources to identify lung illness. The present research proposed an ensemble model comprised of VGG-19, ResNet50, and a vision transformer for the detection of COVID-19 and normal images with an accuracy of 92.46 percent and 94.52 % for the detection of COVID-19, normal and viral pneumonia respectively. Also, a comparative study has been conducted between CNN and ensemble approach for detecting COVID-19 and pneumonia disease from chest x-ray images. The proposed approach may also help in the early detection of other variants of COVID-19 such as JN.1, and HV.1 in the future.