A novel comparative study for detection of Covid-19 on CT lung images using texture analysis, machine learning, and deep learning methods

The Covid-19 virus outbreak that emerged in China at the end of 2019 caused a huge and devastating effect worldwide. In patients with severe symptoms of the disease, pneumonia develops due to Covid-19 virus. This causes intense involvement and damage in lungs. Although the emergence of the disease occurred a short time ago, many literature studies have been carried out in which these effects of the disease on the lungs were revealed by the help of lung CT imaging. In this study, 1.396 lung CT images in total (386 Covid-19 and 1.010 Non-Covid-19) were subjected to automatic classification. In this study, Convolutional Neural Network (CNN), one of the deep learning methods, was used which suggested automatic classification of CT images of lungs for early diagnosis of Covid-19 disease. In addition, k-Nearest Neighbors (k-NN) and Support Vector Machine (SVM) was used to compare the classification successes of deep learning with machine learning. Within the scope of the study, a 23-layer CNN architecture was designed and used as a classifier. Also, training and testing processes were performed for Alexnet and Mobilenetv2 CNN architectures as well. The classification results were also calculated for the case of increasing the number of images used in training for the first 23-layer CNN architecture by 5, 10, and 20 times using data augmentation methods. To reveal the effect of the change in the number of images in the training and test clusters on the results, two different training and testing processes, 2-fold and 10-fold cross-validation, were performed and the results of the study were calculated. As a result, thanks to these detailed calculations performed within the scope of the study, a comprehensive comparison of the success of the texture analysis method, machine learning, and deep learning methods in Covid-19 classification from CT images was made. The highest mean sensitivity, specificity, accuracy, F-1 score, and AUC values obtained as a result of the study were 0,9197, 0,9891, 0,9473, 0,9058, 0,9888; respectively for 2-fold cross-validation, and they were 0,9404, 0,9901, 0,9599, 0,9284, 0,9903; respectively for 10-fold cross-validation.