Detection of COVID-19 Using Genomic Image Processing Techniques

Novel Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) is a new pandemic that appeared at the end of March 2019 in Wuhan city, China, which affected millions worldwide. COVID-19 is caused by the novel severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARSCoV-2) epidemic. Also, several viral epidemics have been listed in the last two decades, like the middle east respiratory syndrome coronavirus (MERSCoV) and the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 1 (SARSCoV-1), which cause MERS, and SARS diseases, respectively. Detection of these viral epidemics is a difficult issue because of their genetic similarity. In this paper, an effective automated system was developed to classify these viral epidemics using their complete genomic sequences via the genomic image processing techniques to facilitate the diagnosis and increase the detection accuracy in a short time. Results achieved an overall accuracy of 100% using two classifiers: SVM and KNN. However, the KNN classifier shows a privilege over the SVM in the execution time performance.