CoviExpert: COVID-19 detection from chest X-ray using CNN

Abstract

COVID-19 continues to threaten the world with its impact and severity. This pandemic has created a sense of havoc and shook the world stretching the medical fraternity to an unimaginable extent, who are now facing fatigue and exhaustion. Due to the rapid increase in cases all across the globe demanding extensive medical care, people are hunting for resources like testing facilities, medical drugs and even hospital beds. Even people with mild to moderate infection are panicking and mentally giving up due to anxiety and desperation. To combat these issues, it is necessary to find an inexpensive and faster way to save lives and bring about a much-needed change. The most fundamental way through which this can be achieved is with the help of radiology which involves examination of Chest X rays. They are primarily used for the diagnosis of this disease. But due to panic and severity of this disease a recent trend of performing CT scans has been observed. This has been under scrutiny since it exposes patients to a very high level of radiation known to increase the probability of cancer. As quoted by the AIIMS Director, one CT scan is equivalent to around 300–400 Chest X-rays. Also, it is relatively a much costlier testing method. Hence, in this report, we have presented a Deep learning approach which can detect covid 19 positive cases from Chest X ray images. It involves creation of a Deep learning based Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) using Keras (python library) and integrating the model with a front-end user interface for ease of use. This leads up to the creation of a software which we have named as CoviExpert. It uses the sequential Keras model which is built layer by layer. All the layers are trained independently to make independent predictions which are then combined to give the final output. 1584 images of Chest X-rays of both COVID-19 positive and negative patients have been used as training data. 177 images have been used as testing data. The proposed approach gives a classification accuracy of 99%. CoviExpert can be used on any device by any medical professional to detect Covid positive patients within a few seconds.