A Novel Deep Learning Model for COVID-19 Detection from Combined Heterogeneous X-ray and CT Chest Images

COVID-19 originally started in Wuhan city in China. The disease rapidly became a worldwide pandemic, causing a respiratory illness with symptoms such as coughing, fever, and in more severe cases difficulty in breathing. With the current testing processes, it is very difficult and sometimes impossible to manage and provide the necessary treatment to suspected patients since the number of the infected is rapidly increasing. Hence, the availability of an artificial intelligent driven system can be an assistive tool to provide accurate diagnosis using radiology imaging techniques. In this paper, we put forward a new deep learning architecture, which integrates the Nested Residual Connections (NRCs) in a DarkCovidNet model, called DarkCovidNet-NRC, in order to classify chest images and to detect COVID-19 cases. The proposed architecture is validated with the K-fold cross-validation technique on X-ray and CT chest datasets separately and then combined. The experimental results reveal that the suggested model performs very well in the medical classification task and it competes with the state of the art in multiple performance metrics by respectively achieving an accuracy and precision of 0.9609 and 0.978 on the combined dataset.