COVID-19 Prognosis from Chest X-ray Images by using Deep Learning Approaches: A Next Generation Diagnostic Tool

Abstract

Global public health is overwhelmed due to the ongoing Corona Virus Disease (COVID-19). As of October 2022, the causative virus SARS-CoV-2 and its multiple variants have infected more than 600 million confirmed cases and nearly 6.5 million fatalities globally. The main objective of this reported study is to understand the COVID-19 infection better from the chest X-ray (CXR) image database of COVID-19 cases from the dataset of CXR of normal, pneumonia and COVID-19 patients. Deep learning approaches like VGG-16 and LSTM models were used to classify images as normal, pneumonia and COVID-19 impacted by extracting the features. It has been observed during the COVID-19 pandemic peaks that large number of patients could not avail medical beds and were seen stranded outdoors. To address such health emergency situations with limited available bed and scarcity of expert physicians, computer-aided analysis could save precious lives through early screening and appropriate care. Such computer-based deep-learning strategy could help during future pandemics, especially when the available health resources and the need for preventive measures to take do not match the burden of a disease.