Evaluating Convolutional Neural Networks for COVID-19 classification in chest X-ray images

TL;DR

This paper evaluates four convolutional neural networks for COVID-19 detection in chest X-ray images, demonstrating high accuracy and highlighting strategies like data augmentation to improve performance with limited data.

Contribution

It introduces an automated COVID-19 classification method using four CNN architectures and assesses their effectiveness with cross-validation, emphasizing data augmentation and fine-tuning.

Findings

All CNNs achieved over 97% accuracy.

SqueezeNet achieved the highest accuracy at 99.20%.

Data augmentation improved model performance with limited positive samples.

Abstract

Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic rapidly spread globally, impacting the lives of billions of people. The effective screening of infected patients is a critical step to struggle with COVID-19, and treating the patients avoiding this quickly disease spread. The need for automated and scalable methods has increased due to the unavailability of accurate automated toolkits. Recent researches using chest X-ray images suggest they include relevant information about the COVID-19 virus. Hence, applying machine learning techniques combined with radiological imaging promises to identify this disease accurately. It is straightforward to collect these images once it is spreadly shared and analyzed in the world. This paper presents a method for automatic COVID-19 detection using chest Xray images through four convolutional neural networks, namely: AlexNet, VGG-11, SqueezeNet, and DenseNet-121. This method had been providing accurate diagnostics for positive or negative COVID-19 classification. We validate our experiments using a ten-fold cross-validation procedure over the training and test sets. Our findings include the shallow fine-tuning and data augmentation strategies that can assist in dealing with the low number of positive COVID-19 images publicly available. The accuracy for all CNNs is higher than 97.00%, and the SqueezeNet model achieved the best result with 99.20%.