COV-RadNet: A Deep Convolutional Neural Network for Automatic Detection of COVID-19 from Chest X-Rays and CT Scans

With the increase in severity of COVID-19 pandemic situation, the world is facing a critical fight to cope up with the impacts on human health, education and economy. The ongoing battle with the novel corona virus, is showing much priority to diagnose and provide rapid treatment to the patients. The rapid growth of COVID-19 has broken the healthcare system of the affected countries, creating a shortage in ICUs, test kits, ventilation support system. etc. This paper aims at finding an automatic COVID-19 detection approach which will assist the medical practitioners to diagnose the disease quickly and effectively. In this paper, a deep convolutional neural network, ‘COV-RadNet’ is proposed to detect COVID positive, viral pneumonia, lung opacity and normal, healthy people by analyzing their Chest Radiographic (X-ray and CT scans) images. Data augmentation technique is applied to balance the dataset ‘COVID 19 Radiography Dataset’ to make the classifier more robust to the classification task. We have applied transfer learning approach using four deep learning based models: VGG16, VGG19, ResNet152 and ResNext 101 to detect COVID-19 from chest X-ray images. We have achieved 97% classification accuracy using our proposed COV-RadNet model for COVID/Viral Pneumonia/Lungs Opacity/Normal, 99.5% accuracy to detect COVID/Viral Pneumonia/Normal and 99.72% accuracy to detect COVID and non-COVID people. Using chest CT scan images, we have found 99.25% accuracy to classify between COVID and non-COVID classes. Among the performance of the pre-trained models, ResNext 101 has shown the highest accuracy of 98.5% for multiclass classification (COVID, viral pneumonia, Lungs opacity and normal).