COVIDX: Computer-aided diagnosis of Covid-19 and its severity prediction with raw digital chest X-ray images

TL;DR

COVIDX is an automated system utilizing deep learning on chest X-ray images to diagnose COVID-19, distinguish it from other conditions, and predict its severity, outperforming existing methods in various validation settings.

Contribution

This study introduces COVIDX, a novel three-phase deep learning-based system for COVID-19 diagnosis and severity prediction using chest X-ray images, with extensive validation and accessibility.

Findings

COVIDX outperforms existing methods in all validation settings.

The system effectively distinguishes COVID-19 from pneumonia and healthy cases.

COVIDX is accessible via a cloud webserver and open-source code.

Abstract

Coronavirus disease (COVID-19) is a contagious infection caused by severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus-2 (SARS-COV-2) and it has infected and killed millions of people across the globe. In the absence of specific drugs or vaccines for the treatment of COVID-19 and the limitation of prevailing diagnostic techniques, there is a requirement for some alternate automatic screening systems that can be used by the physicians to quickly identify and isolate the infected patients. A chest X-ray (CXR) image can be used as an alternative modality to detect and diagnose the COVID-19. In this study, we present an automatic COVID-19 diagnostic and severity prediction (COVIDX) system that uses deep feature maps from CXR images to diagnose COVID-19 and its severity prediction. The proposed system uses a three-phase classification approach (healthy vs unhealthy, COVID-19 vs Pneumonia, and COVID-19 severity) using different shallow supervised classification algorithms. We evaluated COVIDX not only through 10-fold cross2 validation and by using an external validation dataset but also in real settings by involving an experienced radiologist. In all the evaluation settings, COVIDX outperforms all the existing stateof-the-art methods designed for this purpose. We made COVIDX easily accessible through a cloud-based webserver and python code available at https://sites.google.com/view/wajidarshad/software and https://github.com/wajidarshad/covidx, respectively.