Transfer learning based novel ensemble classifier for COVID-19 detection from chest CT-scans

Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) is a deadly infection that affects the respiratory organs in humans as well as animals. By 2020, this disease turned out to be a pandemic affecting millions of individuals across the globe. Conducting rapid tests for a large number of suspects preventing the spread of the virus has become a challenge. In the recent past, several deep learning based approaches have been developed for automating the process of detecting COVID-19 infection from Lung Computerized Tomography (CT) scan images. However, most of them rely on a single model prediction for the final decision which may or may not be accurate. In this paper, we propose a novel ensemble approach that aggregates the strength of multiple deep neural network architectures before arriving at the final decision. We use various pre-trained models such as VGG16, VGG19, InceptionV3, ResNet50, ResNet50V2, InceptionResNetV2, Xception, and MobileNet and fine-tune them using Lung CT Scan images. All these trained models are further used to create a strong ensemble classifier that makes the final prediction. Our experiments exhibit that the proposed ensemble approach is superior to existing ensemble approaches and set state-of-the-art results for detecting COVID-19 infection from lung CT scan images.