ABSTRACT
During the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, it is important to improve early diagnosis using effective ways in order to lower the risks and further spread of the viruses as early as possible. This is also important when it comes to appropriate treatments and the reduction of mortality rates. In this respect, computer tomography (CT) scanning is a useful technique in detecting COVID-19. The present paper, as such, is an attempt to contribute to this process by generating an open-source, CT-based image dataset. This dataset contains the CT scans of lung parenchyma regions of 180 COVID-19 positives and 86 COVID-19 negative patients, all from Bursa Yuksek Ihtisas Training and Research Hospital. The experimental studies demonstrate that this dataset is effectively utilized deep learning-based models for diagnostic purposes. Firstly, a smart segmentation mechanism based on the k-means algorithm is applied to this dataset as a pre-processing stage. Then, the performance of the proposed method is evaluated using InceptionV3 and Xception convolutional neural networks, yielding a 96.20% and 96.55% accuracy rate and 95.00% and 95.50% F1-score, respectively. These state-of-the-art models are observed to detect COVID-19 cases faster and more accurately. In addition, the fine-tuning stage of the convolutional neural network (CNN) features sufficiently improves this accuracy rate. For these features, the support vector machine (SVM) classifier is used, resulting in remarkable 96.76% accuracy rate and 95.81% F1-score. The implications of the proposed method are immense both for present-day applications as well as future developments. © 2022, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd.