COVID-19 classification based on CNNs models in CT image datasets

Abstract

The COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic was a global challenge to the whole society and at the same time created a unique situation for the development of science, scientific communication and open access to scientific information. At the beginning of 2019 the world has faced a pandemic of Covid-19 coronavirus. The coronavirus impacted dramatically lives of majority people around the globe. Deep learning methods allow automatic classification of the coronavirus disease from the computer tomography (CT) scans of the lung. In our work we test several popular convolutional neural network (CNN) models to classify slices of the CT scans. In this study we indicate that the VGG-19 model gives the best classification accuracy among the other tested models such as DenseNet201, MobileNetV2, Xception, VGG-16 and ResNet50v2. In particular, the model achieves the accuracy of 99.08% for CovidX CT Dataset and 98.44% for SARS-CoV-2 CT dataset and 92.30% for UCSD COVID-CT dataset. Additionally, our results include 3D heatmaps that explain classification results for each individual model, showing regions of the lung affected by the coronavirus.