COVID-19 Diagnosis System Based on Chest X-ray Images Using Optimized Convolutional Neural Network

It is worth noting that this 21st century has experienced so many economic, social, cultural and political turbulences throughout the world. The 2019 novel coronavirus (COVID-19) outbreak has been regarded by the World Health Organization (WHO) as a public health crisis of global concern. Nowadays, the chest X-ray (CXR) and chest computed tomography (CT) are a more effective imaging technique for diagnosing lung related problems. Deep learning has been more mature in the field of supervised learning, but other areas of machine learning have just started, especially for the areas of unsupervised learning and reinforcement learning. Deep learning has very good performance in speech recognition and image recognition. Using deep learning approaches to diagnose COVID-19 can achieve better cures and treatments. This research presents the data augmentation and L2 regularization approach for transfer learning in several state-of-the-art deep learning models such as VGG16, VGG19, ResNet, and AlexNet, with Convolutional Block Attention Module (CBAM) to perform binary classification ( such as normal and COVID-19/pneumonia cases or COVID-19 and pneumonia cases) and also multi-class classification (such as COVID-19, pneumonia, and normal cases) of covid-chestxray-dataset and NIH datasets. In addition, the performance evaluation adopted the confused matrix to evaluate the results of these models. To sum up, the CBAM can improve the accuracy of all deep learning models to achieve better performance in contrast to that without this architecture. The findings can be a reference for the related COVID-19 diagnosis researches especially during the post-pandemic era.