Competitive Deep Learning Methods for COVID-19 Detection using X-ray Images

After the World War II, every country throughout the world is experiencing the biggest crisis induced by the devastating Coronavirus disease (COVID-19), which initially arose in the city of Wuhan in December 2019. This global pandemic has severely affected not only the health of billions of people but also the economy of countries all over the world. It has been evident that novel virus has infected a total of 20,674,903 lives as on 12 August 2020. The dissemination of the virus can be regulated by detecting the positive COVID cases as soon as possible. The reverse-transcriptase polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR) is the basic approach used in the identification of the COVID-19. As RT-PCR is less sensitive to determine the novel virus at the beginning stage, it is worthwhile to develop more robust and other diagnosis approaches for the detection of the novel coronavirus. Due to the accessibility of medical datasets comprising of radiography images publicly, more robust diagnosis approaches are contributed by the researchers and technocrats for the identification of COVID-19 images using the techniques of deep leaning. In this paper, we proposed VGG16 and MobileNet-V2, which makes use of ADAM and RMSprop optimizers for the automatic identification of the COVID-19 images from other pneumonia chest X-ray images. Then, the efficiency of the proposed methodology has been enhanced by the application of data augmentation and transfer learning approach which is used to overcome the overfitting problem. From the experimental outcomes, it can be deduced that the proposed MobileNet-V2 model using ADAM and RMSprop optimizer achieves better accomplishment in terms of accuracy, sensitivity and specificity when contrasted with the VGG 16 using ADAM and RMSprop optimizers.