Identification and Localization of COVID-19 Abnormalities on Chest Radiographs using Ensembled Deep Neural Networks

Abstract

With the hit of the global pandemic COVID-19, the chest X-ray domain has gained prominence. It has been recognised as one of the principal methods to learn the presence of infection and its effect on various internal organs like the lungs. Chest radiographs show abnormalities due to COVID-19 that appear similar to the anomalies caused by other viruses and bacteria, thus making it challenging for technicians to detect. Therefore, it becomes almost inevitable to have a computer vision model that identifies and localizes the COVID-19 virus to help doctors provide an immediate and confident diagnosis. The models in computer vision tasks have seen considerable advancements in deep learning, so the proposed model tried to integrate a few of them to come up with a model for classifying and localising the diagnosis of COVID-19 using chest X-rays. This paper ensembles a few state-of-the-art models in classification and object detection to build a model for chest radiograph diagnosis. The proposed ensembled model is found to achieve the mean Average Precision value of 0.627 on SIIM-FISABIO-RSNA COVID-19 dataset.