Comparison of Classification Models Based on Deep learning on COVID-19 Chest X-Rays

Abstract COVID -19, is a deadly, dangerous and contagious disease caused by the novel corona virus. It is very important to detect COVID-19 infection accurately as quickly as possible to avoid the spreading. Deep learning methods can significantly improve the efficiency and accuracy of reading Chest X-Rays (CXRs). The existing Deep learning models with further fine tune provide cost effective, rapid, and better classification results. This paper tries to deploy well studied AI tools with modification on X-ray images to classify COVID 19. This research performs five experiments to classify COVID-19 CXRs from Normal and Viral Pneumonia CXRs using Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN). Four experiments were performed on state-of-the-art pre-trained models using transfer learning and one experiment was performed using a CNN designed from scratch. Dataset used for the experiments consists of chest X-Ray images from the Kaggle dataset and other publicly accessible sources. The data was split into three parts while 90% retained for training the models, 5% each was used in validation and testing of the constructed models. The four transfer learning models used were Inception, Xception, ResNet, and VGG19, that resulted in the test accuracies of 93.07%, 94.8%, 67.5%, and 91.1% respectively and our CNN model resulted in 94.6%.