Classification of COVID-19 in X-ray Images with Genetic Fine-tuning

New and more transmissible SARS-COV-2 variants aggravated the SARS-COV-2 emergence. Lung X-ray images stand out as an alternative to support case screening. The latest computer-aided diagnosis systems have been using Deep Learning (DL) to detect pulmonary diseases. In this context, our work investigates different types of pneumonia detection, including COVID-19, based on X-ray image processing and DL techniques. Our methodology comprehends a pre-processing step including data-augmentation, contrast enhancement, and resizing method to overcome the challenge of heterogeneous and few samples of public datasets. Additionally, we propose a new Genetic Fine-Tuning method to automatically define an optimal set of hyper-parameters of ResNet50 and VGG16 architectures. Our results are encouraging; we achieve an accuracy of 97% considering three classes: COVID-19, other pneumonia, and healthy. Thus, our methodology could assist in classifying COVID-19 pneumonia, which could reduce costs by making the process faster and more efficient.