Detecting COVID-19 Infection Using Customized Convolutional Neural Network

The COVID-19 pandemic has affected 775 million people globally, with an estimated death toll of 7 million. Detection methods like reverse transcription polymer chain reaction (RT-PCR) face multiple challenges, including false positive cases, time-consuming, and high cost. A rapid, precise, affordable screening alternative is essential to expedite COVID-19 detection. Various efforts have focused on expediting COVID-19 detection due to the high costs and logistical challenges associated with traditional methods. This paper proposes a customized deep-learning framework architecture for automatically identifying COVID-19 infection in chest X-ray (CXR) images. Multiple neural networks extract deep features from the CXR images, including popular models such as VGG19, DenseNet201, EfficientNet, MobileNetV2, and InceptionV3. The proposed model undergoes training and testing using the QaTa-COVID-19 dataset. The proposed model achieves classification accuracy of 97.06%, with precision, recall, and F1 score rates for COVID-19 cases recorded at 97.34%, 96.36%, and 97.01%, respectively, for the 4-class cases (COVID vs. Normal vs. Pediatric Bacterial Pneumonia vs. Pediatric Viral Pneumonia).