Deep Transfer Learning Pipelines with Apache Spark and Keras TensorFlow combined with Logistic Regression to Detect COVID-19 in Chest CT Images

Abstract

The SARS-CoV-2 (COVID-19) has propagated rapidly around the world, and it became a global pandemic. It has generated a catastrophic effect on public health. Thus, it is crucial to discover positive cases as early as possible to treat touched patients fastly. Chest CT is one of the methods that play a significant role in diagnosing 2019-nCoV acute respiratory disease. The implementation of advanced deep learning techniques combined with radiological imaging can be helpful for the precise detection of the novel coronavirus. It can also be assistive to surmount the difficult situation of the lack of medical skills and specialized doctors in remote regions. This paper presented Deep Transfer Learning Pipelines with Apache Spark and KerasTensorFlow combined with the Logistic Regression algorithm for automatic COVID-19 detection in chest CT images, using Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) based models VGG16, VGG19, and Xception. Our model produced a classification accuracy of 85.64, 84.25, and 82.87 %, respectively, for VGG16, VGG19, and Xception. HIGHLIGHTS Deep Transfer Learning Pipelines with Apache Spark and Keras TensorFlow combined with Logistic Regression using CT images to screen for Corona Virus Disease (COVID-19) Automatic detection of COVID-19 in chest CT images Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) based models VGG16, VGG19, and Xception to predict COVID-19 in Computed Tomography image GRAPHICAL ABSTRACT