A Novel COVID-19 Detection Model Based on DCGAN and Deep Transfer Learning

A continuing outbreak of pneumonia-related disease novel, Coronavirus has been recorded worldwide and has become a global health problem. This research aims to generate a constructive training data set for a neural network to detect COVID-19 from X-ray images. The creation of medical images is an issue in the field of deep learning. Medical image datasets are frequently unbalanced; using such datasets to train a deep neural network model to correctly classify medical conditions typically leads to over-fitting the data on majority class samples. Data augmentation is commonly used in training data to expand the dataset. Data augmentation may not be beneficial in medical domains with limited data. This paper proposed a data generation model using a Deep Convolutional Generative adversarial network (DCGAN), which generates fake instances with comparable properties to the original data. The model's Fréchet Distance of Inception (FID) was 23.78, close to the original data. Deep transfer learning-based models VGG-16, Inceptionv3 and MobilNet, were chosen as the backbone for COVID-19 detection. The present study aims to increase the dataset using the DCGAN data augmentation technique to improve classifier performance.