Recognizing COVID-19 from chest X-ray images for people in rural and remote areas based on deep transfer learning model

In this article, we propose Deep Transfer Learning (DTL) Model for recognizing covid-19 from chest x-ray images. The latter is less expensive, easily accessible to populations in rural and remote areas. In addition, the device for acquiring these images is easy to disinfect, clean and maintain. The main challenge is the lack of labeled training data needed to train convolutional neural networks. To overcome this issue, we propose to leverage Deep Transfer Learning architecture pre-trained on ImageNet dataset and trained Fine-Tuning on a dataset prepared by collecting normal, COVID-19, and other chest pneumonia X-ray images from different available databases. We take the weights of the layers of each network already pre-trained to our model and we only train the last layers of the network on our collected COVID-19 image dataset. In this way, we will ensure a fast and precise convergence of our model despite the small number of COVID-19 images collected. In addition, for improving the accuracy of our global model will only predict at the output the prediction having obtained a maximum score among the predictions of the seven pre-trained CNNs. The proposed model will address a three-class classification problem: COVID-19 class, pneumonia class, and normal class. To show the location of the important regions of the image which strongly participated in the prediction of the considered class, we will use the Gradient Weighted Class Activation Mapping (Grad-CAM) approach. A comparative study was carried out to show the robustness of the prediction of our model compared to the visual prediction of radiologists. The proposed model is more efficient with a test accuracy of 98%, an f1 score of 98.33%, an accuracy of 98.66% and a sensitivity of 98.33% at the time when the prediction by renowned radiologists could not exceed an accuracy of 63.34% with a sensitivity of 70% and an f1 score of 66.67%.