Using Deep Learning Algorithms to Diagnose Coronavirus Disease (COVID-19)

Abstract

With the rapid development in the area of Machine Learning (ML) and Deep learning, it is important to exploit these tools to contribute to mitigating the effects of the coronavirus pandemic. Early diagnosis of the presence of this virus in the human body can be crucially helpful to healthcare professionals. In this paper, three well-known Convolutional Neural Network deep learning algorithms (VGGNet 16, GoogleNet and ResNet50) are applied to measure their ability to distinguish COVID-19 patients from other patients and to evaluate the best performance among these algorithms with a large dataset. Two stages are conducted, the first stage with 14994 x-ray images and the second one with 33178. Each model has been applied with different batch sizes 16, 32 and 64 in each stage to measure the impact of data size and batch size factors on the accuracy results. The second stage achieved accuracy better than the first one and the 64 batch size gain best results than the 16 and 32. ResNet50 achieves a high rate of 99.31, GoogleNet model achieves 95.55, while VGG16 achieves 96.5. Ultimately, the results affect the process of expediting the diagnosis and referral of these treatable conditions, thereby facilitating earlier treatment, and resulting in improved clinical outcomes.