COVID-19 and pneumonia diagnosis from chest X-ray images using convolutional neural networks

X-ray is a useful imaging modality widely utilized for diagnosing COVID-19 virus that infected a high number of people all around the world. The manual examination of these X-ray images may cause problems especially when there is lack of medical staff. Usage of deep learning models is known to be helpful for automated diagnosis of COVID-19 from the X-ray images. However, the widely used convolutional neural network architectures typically have many layers causing them to be computationally expensive. To address these problems, this study aims to design a lightweight differential diagnosis model based on convolutional neural networks. The proposed model is designed to classify the X-ray images belonging to one of the four classes that are Healthy, COVID-19, viral pneumonia, and bacterial pneumonia. To evaluate the model performance, accuracy, precision, recall, and F1-Score were calculated. The performance of the proposed model was compared with those obtained by applying transfer learning to the widely used convolutional neural network models. The results showed that the proposed model with low number of computational layers outperforms the pre-trained benchmark models, achieving an accuracy value of 89.89% while the best pre-trained model (Efficient-Net B2) achieved accuracy of 85.7%. In conclusion, the proposed lightweight model achieved the best overall result in classifying lung diseases allowing it to be used on devices with limited computational power. On the other hand, all the models showed a poor precision on viral pneumonia class and confusion in distinguishing it from bacterial pneumonia class, thus a decrease in the overall accuracy.