Drawing insights from COVID-19-infected patients using CT scan images and machine learning techniques: a study on 200 patients

As the whole world is witnessing what novel coronavirus (COVID-19) can do to the mankind, it presents several unique features also. In the absence of specific vaccine for COVID-19, it is essential to detect the disease at an early stage and isolate an infected patient. Till today there is a global shortage of testing labs and testing kits for COVID-19. This paper discusses about the role of machine learning techniques for getting important insights like whether lung computed tomography (CT) scan should be the first screening/alternative test for real-time reverse transcriptase-polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR), is COVID-19 pneumonia different from other viral pneumonia and if yes how to distinguish it using lung CT scan images from the carefully selected data of lung CT scan COVID-19-infected patients from the hospitals of Italy, China, Moscow and India? For training and testing the proposed system, custom vision software of Microsoft azure based on machine learning techniques is used. An overall accuracy of almost 91% is achieved for COVID-19 classification using the proposed methodology.