Submitted:
12 February 2022
Posted:
18 February 2022
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Preprints on COVID-19 and SARS-CoV-2
Abstract
COVID-19 has a severe risk of spreading rapidly, the quick identification of which is essential. In this regard, chest radiology images have proven to be a practical screening approach for COVID-19 affected patients. This study proposes a deep learning-based approach using Densenet-121 to detect COVID-19 patients effectively. We have trained and tested our model on the COVIDx dataset and performed both 2-class and 3-class classification, achieving 96.49% and 93.71% accuracy, respectively. By successfully utilizing transfer learning, we achieve comparable performance to the state-of-the-art method while using 15x fewer model parameters. Moreover, we performed an interpretability analysis using Grad-CAM to highlight the most significant image regions at test time. Finally, we developed a website that takes chest radiology images as input and detects the presence of COVID-19 or pneumonia and a heatmap highlighting the infected regions. Source code for reproducing results and model weights are available.
Keywords:
deep learning
; CNN
; DenseNet
; COVID-19
; transfer learning
Copyright: This open access article is published under a Creative Commons CC BY 4.0 license, which permit the free download, distribution, and reuse, provided that the author and preprint are cited in any reuse.