Identification of Images of COVID-19 from Chest X-rays Using Deep Learning: Comparing COGNEX VisionPro Deep Learning 1.0™ Software with Open Source Convolutional Neural Networks

The novel Coronavirus, COVID-19, pandemic is being considered the most crucial health calamity of the century. Many organizations have come together during this crisis and created various Deep Learning models for the effective diagnosis of COVID-19 from chest radiography images. For example, The University of Waterloo, along with Darwin AI—a start-up spin-off of this department, has designed the Deep Learning model ‘COVID-Net’ and created a dataset called ‘COVIDx’ consisting of 13,975 images across 13,870 patient cases. In this study, COGNEX’s Deep Learning Software, VisionPro Deep Learning™, is used to classify these Chest X-rays from the COVIDx dataset. The results are compared with the results of COVID-Net and various other state-of-the-art Deep Learning models from the open-source community. Deep Learning tools are often referred to as black boxes because humans cannot interpret how or why a model is classifying an image into a particular class. This problem is addressed by testing VisionPro Deep Learning with two settings, first, by selecting the entire image as the Region of Interest (ROI), and second, by segmenting the lungs in the first step, and then doing the classification step on the segmented lungs only, instead of using the entire image. VisionPro Deep Learning results: on the entire image as the ROI it achieves an overall F score of 94.0%, and on the segmented lungs, it gets an F score of 95.3%, which is better than COVID-Net and other state-of-the-art open-source Deep Learning models.