Machine learning-based automatic detection of novel coronavirus (COVID-19) disease

Abstract The pandemic was announced by the world health organization coronavirus (COVID-19) universal health dilemma. Any scientific appliance which contributes expeditious detection of coronavirus with a huge recognition rate may be excessively fruitful to doctors. In this environment, innovative automation like deep learning, machine learning, image processing and medical image like chest radiography (CXR), computed tomography (CT) has been refined promising solution contrary to COVID-19. Currently, a reverse transcription-polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR) test has been used to detect the coronavirus. Due to the moratorium period is high on results tested and huge false negative estimates, substitute solutions are desired. Thus, an automated machine learning-based algorithm is proposed for the detection of COVID-19 and the grading of nine different datasets. This research impacts the grant of image processing and machine learning to expeditious and definite coronavirus detection using CXR and CT medical imaging. This results in early detection, diagnosis, and cure for the accomplishment of COVID-19 as early as possible. Firstly, images are preprocessed by normalization to enhance the quality of the image and removing of noise. Secondly, segmentation of images is done by fuzzy c-means clustering. Then various features namely, statistical, textural, histogram of gradients, and discrete wavelet transform are extracted (92) and selected from the feature vector by principle component analysis. Lastly, k-NN, SRC, ANN, and SVM are used to make decisions for normal, pneumonia, COVID-19 positive patients. The performance of the system has been validated by the k (5) fold cross-validation technique. The proposed algorithm achieves 91.70% (k-Nearest Neighbor), 94.40% (Sparse Representation Classifier), 96.16% (Artificial Neural Network), and 99.14% (Support Vector Machine) for COVID detection. The proposed results show feature combination and selection improves the performance in 14.34 s with machine learning and image processing techniques. Among k-NN, SRC, ANN, and SVM classifiers, SVM shows more efficient results that are promising and comparable with the literature. The proposed approach results in an improved recognition rate as compared to the literature review. Therefore, the algorithm proposed shows immense potential to benefit the radiologist for their findings. Also, fruitful in prior virus diagnosis and discriminate pneumonia between COVID-19 and other pandemics.