The Detection of COVID-19 in CT Medical Images: A Deep Learning Approach

Abstract

The COVID-19 coronavirus is one of the latest viruses that hit the earth in the new century. It was declared as a pandemic by the World Health Organization in 2020. In this chapter, a model for the detection of COVID-19 virus from CT chest medical images will be presented. The proposed model is based on Generative Adversarial Networks (GAN), and a fine-tuned deep transfer learning model. GAN is used to generate more images from the available dataset. While deep transfer models are used to classify the COVID-19 virus from the normal class. The original dataset consists of 746 images. The is divided into two parts; 90% for the training and validation phase, while 10% for the testing phase. The 90% then is divided into 80% percent for the training and 20% percent for the validation after using GAN as image augmenter. The proposed GAN architecture raises the number of images in the training and validation phase to be 10 times larger than the original dataset. The deep transfer models which are selected for experimental trials are Resnet50, Shufflenet, and Mobilenet. They were selected as they include a medium number of layers on their architectures if they are com-pared with large deep transfer models such as DenseNet, and Inception-ResNet. This will reflect on the performance of the proposed model in terms of reducing training time, memory and CPU usage. The experimental trials show that Shufflenet is selected to be the optimal deep transfer learning in the proposed model as it achieves the highest possible for testing accuracy and performance metrics. Shufflenet achieves an overall testing accuracy with 84.9, and 85.33% in all performance metrics which include recall, precision, and F1 score.