ABSTRACT
Rapid and accurate detection of COVID-19 coronavirus is necessity of time to prevent and control of this pandemic by timely quarantine and medical treatment in absence of any vaccine. Daily increase in cases of COVID-19 patients worldwide and limited number of available detection kits pose difficulty in identifying the presence of disease. Therefore, at this point of time, necessity arises to look for other alternatives. Among already existing, widely available and low-cost resources, X-ray is frequently used imaging modality and on the other hand, deep learning techniques have achieved state-of-the-art performances in computer-aided medical diagnosis. Therefore, an alternative diagnostic tool to detect COVID-19 cases utilizing available resources and advanced deep learning techniques is proposed in this work. The proposed method is implemented in four phases, viz., data augmentation, preprocessing, stage-I and stage-II deep network model designing. This study is performed with online available resources of 1215 images and further strengthen by utilizing data augmentation techniques to provide better generalization of the model and to prevent the model overfitting by increasing the overall length of dataset to 1832 images. Deep network implementation in two stages is designed to differentiate COVID-19 induced pneumonia from healthy cases, bacterial and other virus induced pneumonia on X-ray images of chest. Comprehensive evaluations have been performed to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method with both (i) training-validation-testing and (ii) 5-fold cross validation procedures. High classification accuracy as 97.77%, recall as 97.14% and precision as 97.14% in case of COVID-19 detection shows the efficacy of proposed method in present need of time. Further, the deep network architecture showing averaged accuracy/sensitivity/specificity/precision/F1-score of 98.93/98.93/98.66/96.39/98.15 with 5-fold cross validation makes a promising outcome in COVID-19 detection using X-ray images.