Efficient multimodal deep-learning-based COVID-19 diagnostic system for noisy and corrupted images

INTRODUCTION: In humanity’s ongoing fight against its common enemy of COVID-19, researchers have been relentless in finding efficient technologies to support mitigation, diagnosis, management, contact tracing, and ultimately vaccination. OBJECTIVES: Engineers and computer scientists have deployed the potent properties of deep learning models (DLMs) in COVID-19 detection and diagnosis. However, publicly available datasets are often adulterated during collation, transmission, or storage. Meanwhile, inadequate, and corrupted data are known to impact the learnability and efficiency of DLMs. METHODS: This study focuses on enhancing previous efforts via two multimodal diagnostic systems to extract required features for COVID-19 detection using adulterated chest X-ray images. Our proposed DLM consists of a hierarchy of convolutional and pooling layers that are combined to support efficient COVID-19 detection using chest X-ray images. Additionally, a batch normalization layer is used to curtail overfitting that usually arises from the convolution and pooling (CP) layers. RESULTS: In addition to matching the performance of standard techniques reported in the literature, our proposed diagnostic systems attain an average accuracy of 98% in the detection of normal, COVID-19, and viral pneumonia cases using corrupted and noisy images. CONCLUSIONS: Such robustness is crucial for real-world applications where data is usually unavailable, corrupted, or adulterated.