Automatic diagnosis of coronavirus (COVID-19) using shape and texture characteristics extracted from X-Ray and CT-Scan images

Automatic diagnosis of coronavirus (COVID-19) is studied in this research. Deep learning methods especially convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have shown great success in COVID-19 diagnosis in recent works. But they are efficient when the depth of network is high enough. However, the use of a deep network requires a sufficiently large training set, which is not available in practice. From the other hand, the use of a shallow CNN may not provide superior results because it is not able to rich feature extraction due to lacking enough convolutional layers. To deal with this difficulty, the contextual features reduced by convolutional filters (CFRCF) is proposed in this work. CFRCF extracts shape and textural features as contextual feature maps from the chest X-ray radiographs and abdominal computed tomography (CT) images. Morphological operators, Gabor filter banks and attribute filters are used for contextual feature extraction. Then, two convolutional filters are applied to the contextual feature cube to extract the nonlinear sub-features and hidden relationships among the contextual features. Finally, a fully connected layer is used to produce a reduced feature vector which is fed to a classifier. Support vector machine and random forest are used as classifier. The experimental results show the superior performance of the proposed method from the recognition accuracy and running time point of view using limited training samples. More than 76% and 94% overall classification accuracy is obtained by the proposed method in CT scan and X-ray images datasets, respectively.