Covid-19 Versus Lung Cancer: Analyzing Chest CT Images Using Deep Ensemble Neural Network

With a high rise in deaths caused due to novel coronavirus (nCoV), immunocompromised persons are at high risk. Lung cancer is no exception. Classifying lung cancer patients and Covid-19 is the primary aim of the paper. For this, we propose a deep ensemble neural network (VGG16, DenseNet121, ResNet50 and custom CNN) to detect Covid-19 and lung cancer using chest CT images. We validate our model using three different datasets, namely SPIE AAPM Lung CT Challenge (1503 images), Covid CT dataset (349 images), and SARS-CoV-2 CT-scan dataset (1252 images). We utilize a k(= 5) fold cross-validation approach on the individual deep neural networks (DNNs) and a custom designed CNN model architecture, and achieve a benchmark score of 96.30% (accuracy) with a sensitivity and precision value of 96.39% and 98.44%, respectively. The proposed model effectively utilizes diverse models. To the best of our knowledge, using ensemble DNN, this is the first time we analyze chest CT images to separate lung cancer from Covid-19 (and vice-versa). As our aim is to classify Covid-19 and lung cancer using chest CT images, it helps in prioritizing immunocompromised persons from Covid-19 for a better patient care. Also, mass screening is possible especially in resource-constrained regions since CT scans are cheaper. The long-term goal is to check whether AI-guided tool(s) is(are) able to prioritize patients that are at high risk (e.g., lung disease) from any possible future infectious disease outbreaks.