An Artificial Intelligence Based Technique for COVID-19 Diagnosis from Chest X-Ray

The COVID-19 pandemic had a catastrophic impact on world health and economic. This is attributed to the unavoidable delay in the diagnosis process, due to limitation of COVID-19 test kits. Thus, it is urgently required to establish more cheap and affordable diagnostic approaches. Chest X-ray is an important initial step towards a successful COVID-19 diagnose, where it is easily to detect any chest abnormalities (e.g., lung inflammation). Furthermore, majority of hospitals have X-ray devices that can be used in early COVID-19 diagnosis. However, the shortage of radiologists is a key factor that limits early COVID-19 diagnosis and negatively affects the treatment process. This paper presents an artificial intelligence based technique for early COVID-19 diagnosis from chest X-ray images using medical knowledge and deep Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs). To this end, a deep learning model is built carefully and fine-tuned to achieve the maximum performance in COVID-19 detection. Experimental results on recent benchmark datasets demonstrate the superior performance of the proposed technique in identifying COVID-19 with 96% accuracy.