The world is experiencing an unprecedented crisis due to the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) outbreak that has affected nearly 216 countries and territories across the globe. Since the pandemic outbreak, there is a growing interest in computational model-based diagnostic technologies to support the screening and diagnosis of COVID-19 cases using medical imaging such as chest X-ray (CXR) scans. It is discovered in initial studies that patients infected with COVID-19 show abnormalities in their CXR images that represent specific radiological patterns. Still, detection of these patterns is challenging and time-consuming even for skilled radiologists. In this study, we propose a novel convolutional neural network- (CNN-) based deep learning fusion framework using the transfer learning concept where parameters (weights) from different models are combined into a single model to extract features from images which are then fed to a custom classifier for prediction. We use gradient-weighted class activation mapping to visualize the infected areas of CXR images. Furthermore, we provide feature representation through visualization to gain a deeper understanding of the class separability of the studied models with respect to COVID-19 detection. Cross-validation studies are used to assess the performance of the proposed models using open-access datasets containing healthy and both COVID-19 and other pneumonia infected CXR images. Evaluation results show that the best performing fusion model can attain a classification accuracy of 95.49% with a high level of sensitivity and specificity.
【초록키워드】 COVID-19, coronavirus disease, coronavirus, pandemic, deep learning, Pneumonia, diagnostic, Accuracy, Sensitivity and specificity, outbreak, Medical imaging, Patient, Visualization, chest X-ray, dataset, COVID-19 cases, Cross-validation, CXR, best, convolutional neural network-, Support, Radiologists, Activation, Classifier, transfer, Abnormalities, abnormality, parameter, country, feature, radiological, initial, affected, globe, healthy, time-consuming, diagnosis of COVID-19, infected with COVID-19, Still, 【제목키워드】 COVID-19, detection, learning, artificial, Model, Image, deep, Neural,