A Distribution-based Regression for Real-time COVID-19 Cases Detection from Chest X-ray and CT Images

The novel coronavirus (COVID-19) that started last December in Wuhan, Hubei Province, China has become a serious healthcare threat with over five million confirmed cases in 215 countries around the world as on May 20. The World Health Organization recommends a rapid diagnosis and immediate isolation of suspected cases. Thus, there is an imminent need to develop an automatic real-time detection system as a quick alternative diagnosis option to control the virus spread. In this work, we propose a regression model based on a flexible distribution called shifted-scaled Dirichlet for real-time detection of coronavirus pneumonia infected patient using chest X-ray radiographs. To derive the parameters of our proposed model, we adopt the maximum likelihood method, where we update the parameters based on the stochastic gradient descent. The experimental results demonstrate that our approach is highly effective for detecting COVID-19 cases and understand the infection on a real-time basis with high accuracy up to 97%.