The diagnostic evaluation of Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) for the assessment of chest X-ray of patients infected with COVID-19

Abstract Introduction The main target of COVID-19 is the lungs where it may cause pneumonia in severely ill patients. Chest X-ray is an important diagnostic test to assess the lung for the damaging effects of COVID-19. Many other microbial pathogens can also cause damage to lungs leading to pneumonia but there are certain radiological features which can favor the diagnosis of pneumonia caused by COVID-19. With the rising number of cases of COVID-19, it would be imperative to develop computer programs which may assist the health professionals in the prevailing scenario. Materials & Methods A total of two hundred and seventy eight (278) images of chest X-rays have been assessed by applying ResNet-50 convolutional neural network architectures in the present study. The digital images were acquired from the public repositories provided by University of Montreal and National Institutes of Health. These digital images of Chest X-rays were divided into three groups labeled as normal, pneumonia and COVID-19. The third group contains digital images of chest X-rays of patients diagnosed with COVID-19 infection while the second group contains images of lung with pneumonia caused by other pathogens. Results The radiological images included in the data set are 89 images of lungs with COVID-19 infection, 93 images of lungs without any radiological abnormality and 96 images of patient with pneumonia caused by other pathogens. In this data set, 80% of the images were employed for training, and 20% for testing. A pre-trained (on ImageNet data set) ResNet-50 architecture was used to diagnose the cases of COVID-19 infections on lung X-ray images. The analysis of the data revealed that computer vision based program achieved diagnostic accuracy of 98.18 %, and F1-score of 98.19. Conclusion The performance of convolutional neural network regarding the differentiation of pulmonary changes caused by COVID-19 from the other type of pneumonias on digital images of the chest X-rays is excellent and it may be an extremely useful adjunct tool for the health professionals.