A deep transfer learning approach for COVID-19 detection and exploring a sense of belonging with Diabetes

Abstract

COVID-19 is an epidemic disease that results in death and significantly affects the older adult and those afflicted with chronic medical conditions. Diabetes medication and high blood glucose levels are significant predictors of COVID-19-related death or disease severity. Diabetic individuals, particularly those with preexisting comorbidities or geriatric patients, are at a higher risk of COVID-19 infection, including hospitalization, ICU admission, and death, than those without Diabetes. Everyone's lives have been significantly changed due to the COVID-19 outbreak. Identifying patients infected with COVID-19 in a timely manner is critical to overcoming this challenge. The Real-Time Polymerase Chain Reaction (RT-PCR) diagnostic assay is currently the gold standard for COVID-19 detection. However, RT-PCR is a time-consuming and costly technique requiring a lab kit that is difficult to get in crises and epidemics. This work suggests the CIDICXR-Net50 model, a ResNet-50-based Transfer Learning (TL) method for COVID-19 detection via Chest X-ray (CXR) image classification. The presented model is developed by substituting the final ResNet-50 classifier layer with a new classification head. The model is trained on 3,923 chest X-ray images comprising a substantial dataset of 1,360 viral pneumonia, 1,363 normal, and 1,200 COVID-19 CXR images. The proposed model's performance is evaluated in contrast to the results of six other innovative pre-trained models. The proposed CIDICXR-Net50 model attained 99.11% accuracy on the provided dataset while maintaining 99.15% precision and recall. This study also explores potential relationships between COVID-19 and Diabetes.

Keywords: COVID-19; chest x-ray; convolutional neural network; deep learning; diabetes mellitus; long-Covid; transfer learning.