An Automated Chest X-Ray Image Analysis for Covid-19 and Pneumonia Diagnosis Using Deep Ensemble Strategy

Precise and timely diagnosis of Covid-19 and pneumonia is crucial for effective treatment. However, the traditional RT-PCR method is time-consuming, costly, and prone to incorrect results. To address these limitations, a deep ensemble strategy is proposed as a promising alternative to provide more accurate and reliable outcomes. The strategy comprises three main stages: i) pre-processing, ii) salient feature extraction, and iii) training and classification. In the pre-processing step, the authors resize the images to the desired input shape. Data augmentation techniques, such as zooming, nearest full mode, rotation, and flipping, are employed to augment the dataset, thereby improving the training accuracy of the proposed approach. Additionally, the proposed method leverages the capabilities of VGG-16, DenseNet-201, and Efficient-B0 models using transfer-learning techniques to extract deep features from the images. These salient features are then passed through proposed fully connected layers and ensemble classifiers to predict the probability of the given classes. Extensive experiments were conducted on a chest X-ray image dataset, demonstrating that the proposed system outperforms contemporary techniques in terms of precision, recall, F1-score, and accuracy (acc). The proposed method obtained 97% of acc, while 96%, 95%, and 97% pre, rec, and F1-score respectively. In conclusion, this study presents a valuable contribution to medical image diagnosis using an AI-based deep ensemble strategy. The proposed approach offers a promising solution for accurate and efficient diagnosis of Covid-19 and pneumonia, assisting healthcare professionals in making informed decisions for optimal treatment outcomes.