Automated COVID-19 Detection from WBC-DIFF Scattergram Images with Hybrid CNN Model Using Feature Selection

Abstract

In the medical diagnosis such as WBC (white blood cell), the scattergram images show the relationships between neutrophils, eosinophils, basophils, lymphocytes, and monocytes cells in the blood. For COVID-19 detection, the distributions of these cells differ in healthy and COVID-19 patients. This study proposes a hybrid CNN model for COVID-19 detection using scatter images obtained from WBC sub (differential-DIFF) parameters instead of CT or X-Ray scans. As a data set, the scattergram images of 335 COVID-19 suspects without chronic disease, collected from the biochemistry department of Elazig Fethi Sekin City Hospital, are examined. At first, the data augmentation is performed by applying HSV(Hue, Saturation, Value) and CIE-1931(Commission Internationale de l'éclairage) conversions. Thus, three different image large sets are obtained as a result of raw, CIE-1931, and HSV conversions. Secondly, feature extraction is applied by giving these images as separate inputs to the CNN model. Finally, the ReliefF feature extraction algorithm is applied to determine the most dominant features in feature vectors and to determine the features that maximize classification accuracy. The obtaining feature vector is classified with high-performance SVM in binary classification. The overall accuracy is 95.2%, and the F1-Score is 94.1%. The results show that the method can successfully detect COVID -19 disease using scattergram images and is an alternative to CT and X-Ray scans.