Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) in COVID-19 Detection: A Case Study with Chest CT Scan Images

Deep Learning, especially Convolutional Neural Net-works (CNN) have been performing very well for the last decade in medical image classification. CNN has already shown a great prospect in detecting COVID-19 from chest X-ray images. However, due to its three dimensional data, chest CT scan images can provide better understanding of the affected area through segmentation in comparison to the chest X-ray images. But the chest CT scan images have not been explored enough to achieve sufficiently good results in comparison to the X-ray images. However, with proper image pre-processing, fine tuning, and optimization of the models better results can be achieved. This work aims in contributing to filling this void in the literature. On this aspect, this work explores and designs both custom CNN model and three other models based on transfer learning: InceptionV3, ResNet50, and VGG19. The best performing model is VGG19 with an accuracy of 98.39% and F-1 score of 98.52%. The main contribution of this work includes: (i) modeling a custom CNN model and three pre-trained models based on InceptionV3, ResNet50, and VGG19 (ii) training and validating the models with a comparatively larger dataset of 1252 COVID-19 and 1230 non-COVID CT images (iii) fine tune and optimize the designed models based on the parameters like number of dense layers, optimizer, learning rate, batch size, decay rate, and activation functions to achieve better results than the most of the state-of-the-art literature (iv) the designed models are made public in [1] for reproducibility by the research community for further developments and improvements.