Predicting COVID-19 from Chest X-ray Images using a New Deep Learning Architecture

The spread of coronavirus disease in late 2019 caused huge damage to human lives and forced a chaos in health care systems around the globe. Early diagnosis of this disease can help separate patients from healthy people. Therefore, precise COVID-19 detection is necessary to prevent the spread of this virus. Many artificial intelligent technologies for example deep learning models have been applied successfully for this task by employing chest X-ray images. In this paper, we propose to classify chest X-ray images using a new end-to-end convolutional neural network model. This new model consists of six convolutional blocks. Each block consists of one convolutional layer, one ReLU layer, and one max-pooling layer. The new model was applied on a challenging imbalanced COVID-19 dataset of 5000 images, divided into two classes, COVID and Non-COVID. In experiments, the input image is first resized to 256 x 256 x 3 before being fed to the model. Two metrics were used to test our new model: sensitivity and specificity. A sensitivity rate of 97% was achieved along with a specificity rate of 99.32%. These results are promising when compared to other deep learning models applied on the same dataset.