COVID-19 detection method based on SVRNet and SVDNet in lung x-rays

Purpose: To detect and diagnose coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) better and faster, separable VGG-ResNet (SVRNet) and separable VGG-DenseNet (SVDNet) models are proposed, and a detection system is designed, based on lung x-rays to diagnose whether patients are infected with COVID-19. Approach: Combining deep learning and transfer learning, 1560 lung x-ray images in the COVID-19 x-ray image database (COVID-19 Radiography Database) were used as the experimental data set, and the most representative image classification models, VGG16, ResNet50, InceptionV3, and Xception, were fine-tuned and trained. Then, two new models for lung x-ray detection, SVRNet and SVDNet, were proposed on this basis. Finally, 312 test set images (including 44 COVID-19 and 268 normal images) were used as input to evaluate the classification accuracy, sensitivity, and specificity of SVRNet and SVDNet models. Results: In the classification experiment of lung x-rays that tested positive and negative for COVID-19, the classification accuracy, sensitivity, and specificity of SVRNet and SVDNet are 99.13%, 99.14%, 99.12% and 99.37%, 99.43%, 99.31%, respectively. Compared with the VGG16 network, SVRNet and SVDNet increased by 3.07%, 2.84%, 3.31% and 3.31%, 3.13%, 3.50%, respectively. On the other hand, the parameters of SVRNet and SVDNet are $$ and $$ , respectively. These are 61.56% and 55.31% less than VGG16, respectively. Conclusions: The SVRNet and SVDNet models proposed greatly reduce the number of parameters, while improving the accuracy and increasing the operating speed, and can accurately and quickly detect lung x-rays containing COVID-19.