Fast Deep Learning Computer-Aided Diagnosis against the Novel COVID-19 pandemic from Digital Chest X-ray Images

Background and Objective: The novel coronavirus 2019 (COVID-19) is a harmful lung disease that rapidly attacks people worldwide. At the end of 2019, COVID-19 was discovered as mysterious lung disease in Wuhan, Hubei province of China. World health organization (WHO) declared the coronavirus outbreak a pandemic in the second week of March 2020. Simultaneous deep learning detection and classification of COVID-19 from the entire digital X-ray images is the key to efficiently assist patients and physicians for a fast and accurate diagnosis.Methods: In this paper, a deep learning computer-aided diagnosis (CAD) based on the YOLO predictor is proposed to simultaneously detect and diagnose COVID-19 among the other eight lung diseases: Atelectasis, Infiltration, Pneumothorax, Mass, Effusion, Pneumonia, Cardiomegaly, and Nodule. The proposed CAD system is assessed via five-fold tests for multi-class prediction problem using two different databases of chest X-ray images: COVID-19 and ChestX-ray8. The proposed CAD system is trained using an annotated training set of 50,490 chest X-ray images.Results: The suspicious regions of COVID-19 from the entire X-ray images are simultaneously detected and classified end-to-end via the proposed CAD predictor achieving overall detection and classification accuracies of 96.31% and 97.40%, respectively. The most testing images of COVID-19 and other lunge diseases are correctly predicted achieving intersection over union (IoU) with their GTs greater than 90%. Applying deep learning regularizers of data balancing and augmentation improve the diagnostic performance by 6.64% and 12.17% in terms of overall accuracy and F1-score, respectively. Meanwhile, the proposed CAD system presents its feasibility to diagnose the individual chest X-ray image within 0.009 second. Thus, the presented CAD system could predict 108 frames/second (FPS) at the real-time of prediction.Conclusion: The proposed deep learning CAD system shows its capability and reliability to achieve promising COVID-19 diagnostic performance among all other lung diseases. The proposed deep learning model seems reliable to assist health care systems, patients, and physicians in their practical validations.