Detection of COVID-19 and its severity using chest X-rays and electronic health records

ABSTRACT

COVID-19 first emerged in December 2019 in Wuhan, China, and has since spread throughout the world. More than one year has passed, and the virus continues to mutate and infect individuals at an increasingly alarming rate. Providing proper treatment to patients during the initial stages of the infection is highly vital for their survival. There is also a need for quicker testing. Such a situation demands an automated, easy-to-use COVID detection toolkit. Recent research using computer vision techniques suggests that chest X-rays contain essential features about the effects of the virus in the chest region. Advanced deep learning techniques and clinical imaging can be utilized to create a tool to detect COVID-19 and its severity. The proposed tool considers chest X-rays as well as a patient's symptoms to predict whether the patient has COVID or not and predict the severity for positive cases. © 2021 IEEE.