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COVID-19,which is caused by the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), is one of the worst pandemics in recent history. The identification of patients suspected to be infected with COVID-19 is becoming crucial to reduce its spread. We aimed to validate and test a deep learning model to detect COVID-19 based on chest X-rays. The recent deep convolutional neural network (CNN) RegNetX032 was adapted for detecting COVID-19 from chest X-ray (CXR) images using polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR) as a reference. The model was customized and trained on five datasets containing more than 15,000 CXR images (including 4148COVID-19-positive cases) and then tested on 321 images (150 COVID-19-positive) from Montfort Hospital. Twenty percent of the data from the five datasets were used as validation data for hyperparameter optimization. Each CXR image was processed by the model to detect COVID-19. Multi-binary classifications were proposed, such as: COVID-19 vs. normal, COVID-19 + pneumonia vs. normal, and pneumonia vs. normal. The performance results were based on the area under the curve (AUC), sensitivity, and specificity. In addition, an explainability model was developed that demonstrated the high performance and high generalization degree of the proposed model in detecting and highlighting the signs of the disease. The fine-tuned RegNetX032 model achieved an overall accuracy score of 96.0%, with an AUC score of 99.1%. The model showed a superior sensitivity of 98.0% in detecting signs from CXR images of COVID-19 patients, and a specificity of 93.0% in detecting healthy CXR images. A second scenario compared COVID-19 + pneumonia vs. normal (healthy X-ray) patients. The model achieved an overall score of 99.1% (AUC) with a sensitivity of 96.0% and specificity of 93.0% on the Montfort dataset. For the validation set, the model achieved an average accuracy of 98.6%, an AUC score of 98.0%, a sensitivity of 98.0%, and a specificity of 96.0% for detection (COVID-19 patients vs. healthy patients). The second scenario compared COVID-19 + pneumonia vs. normal patients. The model achieved an overall score of 98.8% (AUC) with a sensitivity of 97.0% and a specificity of 96.0%. This robust deep learning model demonstrated excellent performance in detecting COVID-19 from chest X-rays. This model could be used to automate the detection of COVID-19 and improve decision making for patient triage and isolation in hospital settings. This could also be used as a complementary aid for radiologists or clinicians when differentiating to make smart decisions.

The rapid spread of COVID-19 across the globe since its emergence has pushed many countries' healthcare systems to the verge of collapse. To restrict the spread of the disease and lessen the ongoing cost on the healthcare system, it is critical to appropriately identify COVID-19-positive individuals and isolate them as soon as possible. The primary COVID-19 screening test, RT-PCR, although accurate and reliable, has a long turn-around time. More recently, various researchers have demonstrated the use of deep learning approaches on chest X-ray (CXR) for COVID-19 detection. However, existing Deep Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) methods fail to capture the global context due to their inherent image-specific inductive bias. In this article, we investigated the use of vision transformers (ViT) for detecting COVID-19 in Chest X-ray (CXR) images. Several ViT models were fine-tuned for the multiclass classification problem (COVID-19, Pneumonia and Normal cases). A dataset consisting of 7598 COVID-19 CXR images, 8552 CXR for healthy patients and 5674 for Pneumonia CXR were used. The obtained results achieved high performance with an Area Under Curve (AUC) of 0.99 for multi-class classification (COVID-19 vs. Other Pneumonia vs. normal). The sensitivity of the COVID-19 class achieved 0.99. We demonstrated that the obtained results outperformed comparable state-of-the-art models for detecting COVID-19 on CXR images using CNN architectures. The attention map for the proposed model showed that our model is able to efficiently identify the signs of COVID-19. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The coronavirus pandemic is spreading around the world. Medical imaging modalities such as radiography play an important role in the fight against COVID-19. Deep learning (DL) techniques have been able to improve medical imaging tools and help radiologists to make clinical decisions for the diagnosis, monitoring and prognosis of different diseases. Computer-Aided Diagnostic (CAD) systems can improve work efficiency by precisely delineating infections in chest X-ray (CXR) images, thus facilitating subsequent quantification. CAD can also help automate the scanning process and reshape the workflow with minimal patient contact, providing the best protection for imaging technicians. The objective of this study is to develop a deep learning algorithm to detect COVID-19, pneumonia and normal cases on CXR images. We propose two classifications problems, (i) a binary classification to classify COVID-19 and normal cases and (ii) a multiclass classification for COVID-19, pneumonia and normal. Nine datasets and more than 3200 COVID-19 CXR images are used to assess the efficiency of the proposed technique. The model is trained on a subset of the National Institute of Health (NIH) dataset using swish activation, thus improving the training accuracy to detect COVID-19 and other pneumonia. The models are tested on eight merged datasets and on individual test sets in order to confirm the degree of generalization of the proposed algorithms. An explainability algorithm is also developed to visually show the location of the lung-infected areas detected by the model. Moreover, we provide a detailed analysis of the misclassified images. The obtained results achieve high performances with an Area Under Curve (AUC) of 0.97 for multi-class classification (COVID-19 vs. other pneumonia vs. normal) and 0.98 for the binary model (COVID-19 vs. normal). The average sensitivity and specificity are 0.97 and 0.98, respectively. The sensitivity of the COVID-19 class achieves 0.99. The results outperformed the comparable state-of-the-art models for the detection of COVID-19 on CXR images. The explainability model shows that our model is able to efficiently identify the signs of COVID-19. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]