Classification of COVID-19 from X-ray Images using GLCM Features and Machine Learning

Abstract

As the world continues to battle the devastating effects of the COVID-19 pandemic, it has become increasingly crucial to screen patients for contamination accurately and effectively. One of the primary screening methods is chest radiography, utilizing radiological imaging to detect the presence of the virus in the lungs. This study presents a cutting-edge solution to classify COVID-19 infections in chest X-ray images by utilizing the Gray-Level Co-occurrence Matrix (GLCM) and machine learning algorithms. The proposed method analyzes each X-ray image using the GLCM to extract 22 statistical texture features and then trains two machine learning classifiers - K-Nearest Neighbor and Support Vector Machine - on these features. The method was tested on the COVID-19 Radiography Database and was compared to a state-of-the-art method, delivering highly efficient results with impressive sensitivity, accuracy, precision, F1-score, specificity, and Matthew's correlation coefficient. The proposed approach offers a promising new way to classify COVID-19 infections in chest X-ray images and has the potential to play a crucial role in the ongoing fight against the pandemic.