Automatic Detection of COVID-19 Using Ensemble Transfer Learning Based on Lung CT Scans

Abstract

AbstractIn order to curb the rapid spread of COVID-19, early and accurate detection is required. Computer Tomography (CT) scans of the lungs can be utilized for accurate COVID-19 detection because these medical images highlight COVID-19 infection with high sensitivity. Transfer learning was implemented on six state-of-the-art Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs). From these six CNNs, the three with the highest accuracies (based on empirical experiments) were selected and used as base learners to produce hard voting and soft voting ensemble classifiers. These three CNNs were identified as Vgg16, EfficientNetB0 and EfficientNetB5. This study concludes that the soft voting ensemble classifier, with base learners Vgg16 and EfficientNetB5, outperformed all other ensemble classifiers with different base learners and individual models that were investigated. The proposed classifier achieved a new state-of-the-art accuracy on the SARS-CoV-2 dataset. The accuracy obtained from this framework was 98.13%, the recall was 98.94%, the precision was 97.40%, the specificity was 97.30% and the F1 score was 98.16%.KeywordsDeep learningConvolutional neural networkTransfer learningHard votingSoft voting