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Since the outbreak of the global COVID-19 pandemic in Wuhan, China, in 2019, its impact has been seen worldwide. Early identification of COVID-19 is very crucial, as it keeps the infected people isolated from other people, thus minimizing the risk of further transmission. The standard diagnostic approach is based on RT-PCR. However, due to the scarcity of PCR kits in some regions and the costs associated with this technique, there is a growing demand for alternative solutions. Recently, diagnosis of COVID-19 by medical imaging has been recognized as a valid clinical practice. Meanwhile, the massive increase in COVID-19 cases has put considerable pressure on radiologists responsible for interpreting these scans. This paper introduces an automated detection approach as a rapid alternative for COVID-19 diagnosis. We present a deep CNN model to differentiate between normal and pneumonia cases, as well as patients with COVID-19. Our approach is based on EfficientNet-B7 architecture and improved with Squeeze and Excitation block as an attention mechanism. In addition, we propose an innovative architecture that combines CNN with SVM to achieve the best performance. Experimental results show that the proposed framework provides better performance than existing SOTA methods, with an average accuracy of 97.50%, while the precision and recall of COVID-19 are both 100%. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

First outbreak of COVID-19 was in the city of Wuhan in China in Dec.2019 and then it becomes a pandemic disease all around the world. World Health Organization (WHO) confirmed more than 5.5 million cases and 341,155 deaths from the disease till the time of writing this paper. This new worldwide disease forced researchers to make more precise way to diagnose COVID-19. In the last decade, medical imaging techniques show its efficiency in helping radiologists to detect and diagnose the diseases. Deep learning and transfer learning algorithms are good techniques to detect disease from different image source types such as X-Ray and CT scan images. In this work we used a deep learning technique based on Convolution Neural Network (CNN) to detect and diagnose COVID-19 disease using Chest X-ray images. Moreover, the modified AlexNet architecture is proposed in different scenarios were differing from each other in terms of the type of the pooling layers and/or the number of the neurons that have used in the second fully connected layer. The used chest Xray images are gathered from two COVID-19 X-ray image datasets and one dataset includes large number of normal and pneumonia X-ray images. With the proposed models we obtained the same or even better result than the original AlexNet with having a smaller number of neurons in the second fully connected layer. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Coronavirus (COVID-19) infection was initially acknowledged as a global pandemic in Wuhan in China. World Health Organization (WHO) stated that the COVID-19 is an epidemic that causes a 3.4% death rate. Chest X-Ray (CXR) and Computerized Tomography (CT) screening of infected persons are essential in diagnosis applications. There are numerous ways to identify positive COVID-19 cases. One of the fundamental ways is radiology imaging through CXR, or CT images. The comparison of CT and CXR scans revealed that CT scans are more effective in the diagnosis process due to their high quality. Hence, automated classification techniques are required to facilitate the diagnosis process. Deep Learning (DL) is an effective tool that can be utilized for detection and classification this type of medical images. The deep Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) can learn and extract essential features from different medical image datasets. In this paper, a CNN architecture for automated COVID-19 detection from CXR and CT images is offered. Three activation functions as well as three optimizers are tested and compared for this task. The proposed architecture is built from scratch and the COVID-19 image datasets are directly fed to train it. The performance is tested and investigated on the CT and CXR datasets. Three activation functions: Tanh, Sigmoid, and ReLU are compared using a constant learning rate and different batch sizes. Different optimizers are studied with different batch sizes and a constant learning rate. Finally, a comparison between different combinations of activation functions and optimizers is presented, and the optimal configuration is determined. Hence, the main objective is to improve the detection accuracy of COVID-19 from CXR and CT images using DL by employing CNNs to classify medical COVID-19 images in an early stage. The proposed model achieves a classification accuracy of 91.67% on CXR image dataset, and a classification accuracy of 100% on CT dataset with training times of 58 min and 46 min on CXR and CT datasets, respectively. The best results are obtained using the ReLU activation function combined with the SGDM optimizer at a learning rate of 10−5 and a minibatch size of 16. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Coronavirus epidemic first appeared in Wuhan-China on December, 31st, 2019. This has put the world's hospitals, clinics, testing laboratories and health administrations under pressure. As of April, 04th, 2020, the World Health Organization reported more than 167515 confirmed cases in more than 100 countries worldwide. The diagnosis of the epidemic will increase the burden on overburdened testing laboratories. Several screening methods have been proposed in parallel in order to facilitate and, above all, to make rapid diagnosis easier. At this level, X-Ray images seem to be a good accompanying solution for emerging countries to help rapid screening. The solution proposed in this paper consists on a collaborative and smart platform based on the Convolutional Neural Network for Classification and Detection namely VGG16. The platform ensures the fast download of the X-Ray image, with the entry of the patient's personal information followed by the launch of a 5 seconds test. The platform generates, as a result, a PDF file containing all patient information. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]