Deep Learning-Aided Automated Pneumonia Detection and Classification Using CXR Scans

The COVID-19 pandemic has caused a worldwide catastrophe and widespread devastation that reeled almost all countries. The pandemic has mounted pressure on the existing healthcare system and caused panic and desperation. The gold testing standard for COVID-19 detection, reverse transcription-polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR), has shown its limitations with 70% accuracy, contributing to the incorrect diagnosis that exaggerated the complexities and increased the fatalities. The new variations further pose unseen challenges in terms of their diagnosis and subsequent treatment. The COVID-19 virus heavily impacts the lungs and fills the air sacs with fluid causing pneumonia. Thus, chest X-ray inspection is a viable option if the inspection detects COVID-19-induced pneumonia, hence confirming the exposure of COVID-19. Artificial intelligence and machine learning techniques are capable of examining chest X-rays in order to detect patterns that can confirm the presence of COVID-19-induced pneumonia. This research used CNN and deep learning techniques to detect COVID-19-induced pneumonia from chest X-rays. Transfer learning with fine-tuning ensures that the proposed work successfully classifies COVID-19-induced pneumonia, regular pneumonia, and normal conditions. Xception, Visual Geometry Group 16, and Visual Geometry Group 19 are used to realize transfer learning. The experimental results were promising in terms of precision, recall, F1 score, specificity, false omission rate, false negative rate, false positive rate, and false discovery rate with a COVID-19-induced pneumonia detection accuracy of 98%. Experimental results also revealed that the proposed work has not only correctly identified COVID-19 exposure but also made a distinction between COVID-19-induced pneumonia and regular pneumonia, as the latter is a very common disease, while COVID-19 is more lethal. These results mitigated the concern and overlap in the diagnosis of COVID-19-induced pneumonia and regular pneumonia. With further integrations, it can be employed as a potential standard model in differentiating the various lung-related infections, including COVID-19.