A residual network-based framework for COVID-19 detection from CXR images

In late 2019, a new Coronavirus disease (COVID-19) appeared in Wuhan, Hubei Province, China. The virus began to spread throughout many countries, affecting a large population. Polymerase chain reaction is currently being utilized to diagnose COVID-19 in suspected patients; however, its sensitivity is quite low. The researchers also developed automated approaches for reliably and timely identifying COVID-19 from X-ray images. However, traditional machine learning-based image classification algorithms necessitate manual image segmentation and feature extraction, which is a time-consuming task. Due to promising results and robust performance, Convolutional Neural Network (CNN)-based techniques are being used widely to classify COVID-19 from Chest X-rays (CXR). This study explores CNN-based COVID-19 classification methods. A series of experiments aimed at COVID-19 detection and classification validates the viability of our proposed framework. Initially, the dataset is preprocessed and then fed into two Residual Network (ResNet) architectures for deep feature extraction, such as ResNet18 and ResNet50, whereas support vector machines with its multiple kernels, including Quadratic, Linear, Gaussian and Cubic, are used to classify these features. The experimental results suggest that the proposed framework efficiently detects COVID-19 from CXR images. The proposed framework obtained the best accuracy of 97.3% using ResNet50.