COVID-19 Detection using Medical Images

COVID-19 is considered to be the most dangerous and deadly disease for the human body caused by the novel coronavirus. In December 2019, the coronavirus spread rapidly around the world, thought to be originated from Wuhan in China and is responsible for a large number of deaths. Earlier detection of the COVID-19 through accurate diagnosis, particularly for the cases with no obvious symptoms, may decrease the patient’s death rate. Chest X-ray images are primarily used for the diagnosis of this disease. This has proposed a machine vision approach to detect COVID-19 from the chest X-ray images. The features extracted by the histogram oriented gradient (HOG) and convolutional neural network (CNN) from X-ray images were fused to develop the classification model through training by CNN (VGG Net). Modified anisotropic diffusion filtering (MADF) technique was employed for better edge preservation and reduced noise from the images. A watershed segmentation algorithm was used in order to mark the significant fracture region in the input X-ray images. The testing stage considered generalized data for performance evaluation of the model. Cross-validation analysis revealed that a 5-fold strategy could successfully impair the overfitting problem. K-fold cross-validation demonstrated that the proposed feature fusion technique provided higher accuracy than the individual feature extraction methods, such as HOG or CNN.