Diagnosis of COVID-19 based on Chest Radiography

TL;DR

This study develops a deep learning model using ResNet-50 to classify chest X-ray images for COVID-19 diagnosis, achieving high accuracy and demonstrating the impact of image augmentation techniques.

Contribution

The paper compares different CNN architectures and evaluates augmentation strategies to optimize COVID-19 detection from chest radiographs.

Findings

ResNet-50 achieved 95.88% accuracy without augmentation.

Augmentation with rotation and intensity shift improved accuracy to 96.14%.

The proposed model offers a promising tool for COVID-19 diagnosis from X-ray images.

Abstract

The Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) was first identified in Wuhan, China, in early December 2019 and now becoming a pandemic. When COVID-19 patients undergo radiography examination, radiologists can observe the present of radiographic abnormalities from their chest X-ray (CXR) images. In this study, a deep convolutional neural network (CNN) model was proposed to aid radiologists in diagnosing COVID-19 patients. First, this work conducted a comparative study on the performance of modified VGG-16, ResNet-50 and DenseNet-121 to classify CXR images into normal, COVID-19 and viral pneumonia. Then, the impact of image augmentation on the classification results was evaluated. The publicly available COVID-19 Radiography Database was used throughout this study. After comparison, ResNet-50 achieved the highest accuracy with 95.88%. Next, after training ResNet-50 with rotation, translation, horizontal flip, intensity shift and zoom augmented dataset, the accuracy dropped to 80.95%. Furthermore, an ablation study on the effect of image augmentation on the classification results found that the combinations of rotation and intensity shift augmentation methods obtained an accuracy higher than baseline, which is 96.14%. Finally, ResNet-50 with rotation and intensity shift augmentations performed the best and was proposed as the final classification model in this work. These findings demonstrated that the proposed classification model can provide a promising result for COVID-19 diagnosis.