One-shot Cluster-Based Approach for the Detection of COVID–19 from Chest X–ray Images

Coronavirus disease (COVID-19) has infected over more than 28.3 million people around the globe and killed 913K people worldwide as on 11 September 2020. With this pandemic, to combat the spreading of COVID-19, effective testing methodologies and immediate medical treatments are much required. Chest X-rays are the widely available modalities for immediate diagnosis of COVID-19. Hence, automation of detection of COVID-19 from chest X-ray images using machine learning approaches is of greater demand. A model for detecting COVID-19 from chest X-ray images is proposed in this paper. A novel concept of cluster-based one-shot learning is introduced in this work. The introduced concept has an advantage of learning from a few samples against learning from many samples in case of deep leaning architectures. The proposed model is a multi-class classification model as it classifies images of four classes, viz., pneumonia bacterial, pneumonia virus, normal, and COVID-19. The proposed model is based on ensemble of Generalized Regression Neural Network (GRNN) and Probabilistic Neural Network (PNN) classifiers at decision level. The effectiveness of the proposed model has been demonstrated through extensive experimentation on a publicly available dataset consisting of 306 images. The proposed cluster-based one-shot learning has been found to be more effective on GRNN and PNN ensembled model to distinguish COVID-19 images from that of the other three classes. It has also been experimentally observed that the model has a superior performance over contemporary deep learning architectures. The concept of one-shot cluster-based learning is being first of its kind in literature, expected to open up several new dimensions in the field of machine learning which require further researching for various applications.