Detection of COVID-19 and Prediction of Pneumonia from Chest X-Rays using Deep Learning

Abstract

The occurrence of COVID-19 disease and the pandemic has caused severe detrimental effects on global health, economy, and well-being. Ignorance and disobeying precautionary measures result in the rapid spread of this contagious infection and subsequent illnesses. There have been more than forty crore cases and fifty lakh deaths reported worldwide. Though the RT-PCR manual testing is widely carried out for diagnosing the presence of the virus in the human body, it is less reliable than chest CT and X-Ray imaging techniques. These tests are swift and assist in determining the severity of the infection with affordable costs. Hence, recent advances involve the application of artificial intelligence and deep learning techniques for automatic detection of this disease. Various datasets of X-Ray images of the chest are available online which are utilized for training and validation of results. In this paper, a dense layer Convolutional Neural Network with one twenty one layers model is used to predict the pneumonia type from the Chest X-Ray images. The results acquired from the implementation show that the model has the highest accuracy of 0.9738 while the specificity is 93.6%, and it outperforms the other similar models. Hence, the possibility of a false positive case occurring is lower and can facilitate easy diagnosis of the infection.