ABSTRACT
The new type of coronavirus disease, which has spread from Wuhan, China since the beginning of 2020 called COVID-19, has caused many deaths and cases in most countries and has reached a global pandemic scale. In addition to test kits, imaging techniques with X-rays used in lung patients have been frequently used in the detection of COVID-19 cases. In the proposed method, a novel approach based on a deep learning model named DeepCovNet was utilized to classify chest X-ray images containing COVID-19, normal (healthy), and pneumonia classes. The convolutional-autoencoder model, which had convolutional layers in encoder and decoder blocks, was trained by using the processed chest X-ray images from scratch for deep feature extraction. The distinctive features were selected with a novel and robust algorithm named SDAR from the deep feature set. In the classification stage, an SVM classifier with various kernel functions was used to evaluate the classification performance of the proposed method. Also, hyperparameters of the SVM classifier were optimized with the Bayesian algorithm for increasing classification accuracy. Specificity, sensitivity, precision, and F-score, were also used as performance metrics in addition to accuracy which was used as the main criterion. The proposed method with an accuracy of 99.75 outperformed the other approaches based on deep learning.