COVID-19 Detection from Chest X-ray Scans using Machine Learning

Recently, the virus (COVID-19) has spread widely throughout the world and has led to the examination of large numbers of suspected cases using standard COVID-19 tests and has become pandemic. Everyday life, public health and the global economy have been destroyed. The pathogenic laboratory tests such as Polymerase chain reaction (PCR) take a long time with false negative results and are considered the gold standard for diagnosis. Therefore, there was an urgent need for rapid and accurate diagnostic methods to detect COVID-19 cases as soon as possible to prevent the spread of this epidemic and combat it. Applying advanced artificial intelligence techniques along with radiography may be helpful in detecting this disease. In this study, we propose a classification model that detect the infected condition through the chest X-ray images. A dataset containing chest x-ray images of normal people, people with pneumonia such as SARS, streptococcus and pneumococcus and other patients with COVID-19 were collected. Histogram of oriented gradients (HOG) is used for image features extraction. The images are then classified using Support Vector Machines (SVM), random forests and K-nearest neighbors (KNN), with classification rate 98.14%, 96.29% and 88.89% respectively. These results may contribute efficiently in detecting COVID-19 disease.