Transfer learning-based CNN diagnostic framework for diagnosis of COVID-19 from lung CT images

Abstract

ABSTRACT COVID-19 is an infectious disease that affects the respiratory system. To assist the physician in diagnosing lung disorders from chest CT images various systems have been developed and used. Detection of COVID-19 remains a challenging area of research. The objective of the work is to develop an inductive parameter-transfer learning-based approach for the prediction of COVID-19, pneumonia, from lung CT images. Our proposed approach is built on layer wise and convolution block-wise fine-tuning which designs the CNN architecture highly specific to lung CT image. We implemented the DenseNet201, InceptionV3, Xception, VGG19, and ResNet50 as baseline models. The network architectures are developed to learn feature representation of lung CT images. For the experimental analysis, five datasets are used. From the experimental results, it is inferred that the DenseNet201 model yields higher accuracy of 0.94 for Adam optimizer and 0.93 for the RMSprop optimizer compared to other models.