AI-based wavelet and stacked deep learning architecture for detecting coronavirus (COVID-19) from chest X-ray images

A novel coronavirus (COVID-19), belonging to a family of severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARs-CoV-2), was identified in Wuhan city, Hubei, China, in November 2019. The disease had already infected more than 681.529665 million people as of March 13, 2023. Hence, early detection and diagnosis of COVID-19 are essential. For this purpose, radiologists use medical images such as X-ray and computed tomography (CT) images for the diagnosis of COVID-19. It is very difficult for researchers to help radiologists to do automatic diagnoses by using traditional image processing methods. Therefore, a novel artificial intelligence (AI)-based deep learning model to detect COVID-19 from chest X-ray images is proposed. The proposed work uses a wavelet and stacked deep learning architecture (ResNet50, VGG19, Xception, and DarkNet19) named WavStaCovNet-19 to detect COVID-19 from chest X-ray images automatically. The proposed work has been tested on two publicly available datasets and achieved an accuracy of 94.24% and 96.10% on 4 classes and 3 classes, respectively. From the experimental results, we believe that the proposed work can surely be useful in the healthcare domain to detect COVID-19 with less time and cost, and with higher accuracy.