Automatic Detection of Coronavirus (COVID-19) from Chest CT Images using VGG16-Based Deep-Learning

In recent months, coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) has infected millions of people worldwide. In addition to the clinical tests like reverse transcription-polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR), medical imaging techniques such as computed tomography (CT) can be used as a rapid technique to detect and evaluate patients infected by COVID-19. Conventionally, CT-based COVID-19 classification is done by a radiology expert. In this paper, we present a deep learning-based Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) model we developed for the classification of COVID-19 positive patients from healthy subjects using chest CT. We used 10979 chest CT images of 131 patients with COVID-19 and 150 healthy subjects for training, validating, and testing of the proposed model. Evaluation of the results showed the precision of 92%, sensitivity of 90%, specificity of 91%, F1-Score of 0.91, and accuracy of 90%. We have used the regions of infection segmented by a radiologist to increase the generalization and reliability of the results. The plotted heatmaps show that the developed model has focused only on the infected regions of the lungs by COVID-19 to make decisions.