An efficient machine learning-based COVID-19 identification utilizing chest X-ray images

Abstract

There is no well-known vaccine for coronavirus disease (COVID-19) with 100% efficiency. COVID-19 patients suffer from a lung infection, where lung-related problems can be effectively diagnosed with image techniques. The golden test for COVID-19 diagnosis is the RT-PCR test, which is costly, time-consuming and unavailable for various countries. Thus, machine learning-based tools are a viable solution. Here, we used a labelled chest X-ray of three categories, then performed data cleaning and augmentation to use the data in deep learning-based convolutional neural network (CNN) models. We compared the performance of different models that we gradually built and analyzed their accuracy. For that, we used 2905 chest X-ray scan samples. We were able to develop a model with the best accuracy of 97.44% for identifying COVID-19 using X-ray images. Thus, in this paper, we attested the feasibility of efficiently applying machine learning (ML) based models for medical image classification.