Detection and analysis of COVID-19 in medical images using deep learning techniques

Sci Rep. 2021 Oct 4;11(1):19638. doi: 10.1038/s41598-021-99015-3.

Abstract

The main purpose of this work is to investigate and compare several deep learning enhanced techniques applied to X-ray and CT-scan medical images for the detection of COVID-19. In this paper, we used four powerful pre-trained CNN models, VGG16, DenseNet121, ResNet50,and ResNet152, for the COVID-19 CT-scan binary classification task. The proposed Fast.AI ResNet framework was designed to find out the best architecture, pre-processing, and training parameters for the models largely automatically. The accuracy and F1-score were both above 96% in the diagnosis of COVID-19 using CT-scan images. In addition, we applied transfer learning techniques to overcome the insufficient data and to improve the training time. The binary and multi-class classification of X-ray images tasks were performed by utilizing enhanced VGG16 deep transfer learning architecture. High accuracy of 99% was achieved by enhanced VGG16 in the detection of X-ray images from COVID-19 and pneumonia. The accuracy and validity of the algorithms were assessed on X-ray and CT-scan well-known public datasets. The proposed methods have better results for COVID-19 diagnosis than other related in literature. In our opinion, our work can help virologists and radiologists to make a better and faster diagnosis in the struggle against the outbreak of COVID-19.

Publication types

  • Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

  • COVID-19 / diagnosis*
  • COVID-19 / virology
  • Deep Learning*
  • Humans
  • Image Processing, Computer-Assisted
  • SARS-CoV-2 / isolation & purification
  • Thorax / diagnostic imaging
  • Tomography, X-Ray Computed
  • X-Rays