Concat_CNN: A Model to Detect COVID-19 from Chest X-ray Images with Deep Learning

COVID-19 is creating havoc on the lives of human beings all around the world. It continues to affect the normal lives of people. As number of cases are high, a cost effective and fast system is required to detect COVID-19 at appropriate time to provide the necessary healthcare. Chest X-rays have emerged as an easiest way to detect COVID-19 in no time as RT-PCR takes time to detect the infection. In this paper we propose a concatenation-based CNN model that will detect COVID-19 from chest X-rays. We have developed a multiclass classification problem which can detect and classify a chest X-ray image as either COVID + ve, or viral pneumonia, or normal. We have used chest X-rays collected from different open sources. To maintain class balancing, we took 500 images of COVID, 500 normal images, and 500 pneumonia images. We divided our dataset in training, validation, and test set in 70:10:20 ratio respectively. We used four CNNs as feature extractors from the images and concatenated their feature maps to get better efficiency of the network. After training our model for 5 folds, we have obtained around 96.31% accuracy, 95.8% precision, 92.99% recall, and 98.02% AUC. We have compared our work with state-of-the-art pretrained transfer learning algorithms and other state-of-the-art CNN models referred in different research papers. The proposed model (Concat_CNN) exhibits better accuracy than the state-of-the-art models. We hope our proposed model will help to classify chest X-rays effectively and help medical professionals with their treatment.