DeepCOVNet Model for COVID-19 Detection Using Chest X-Ray Images

COVID-19 is an epidemic disease that has threatened all the people at worldwide scale and eventually became a pandemic It is a crucial task to differentiate COVID-19-affected patients from healthy patient populations. The need for technology enabled solutions is pertinent and this paper proposes a deep learning model for detection of COVID-19 using Chest X-Ray (CXR) images. In this research work, we provide insights on how to build robust deep learning based models for COVID-19 CXR image classification from Normal and Pneumonia affected CXR images. We contribute a methodical escort on preparation of data to produce a robust deep learning model. The paper prepared datasets by refactoring, using images from several datasets for ameliorate training of deep model. These recently published datasets enable us to build our own model and compare by using pre-trained models. The proposed experiments show the ability to work effectively to classify COVID-19 patients utilizing CXR. The empirical work, which uses a 3 convolutional layer based Deep Neural Network called "DeepCOVNet" to classify CXR images into 3 classes: COVID-19, Normal and Pneumonia cases, yielded an accuracy of 96.77% and a F1-score of 0.96 on two different combination of datasets.