Pre-processing methods in chest X-ray image classification

BACKGROUND: The SARS-CoV-2 pandemic began in early 2020, paralyzing human life all over the world and threatening our security. Thus, the need for an effective, novel approach to diagnosing, preventing, and treating COVID-19 infections became paramount. METHODS: This article proposes a machine learning-based method for the classification of chest X-ray images. We also examined some of the pre-processing methods such as thresholding, blurring, and histogram equalization. RESULTS: We found the F1-score results rose to 97%, 96%, and 99% for the three analyzed classes: healthy, COVID-19, and pneumonia, respectively. CONCLUSION: Our research provides proof that machine learning can be used to support medics in chest X-ray classification and improving pre-processing leads to improvements in accuracy, precision, recall, and F1-scores.