Multi-kernel CNN block-based detection for COVID-19 with imbalance dataset

Abstract

COVID-19, which originated from Wuhan, rapidly spread throughout the world and became a public health crisis. Recognizing the positive cases at the earliest stage was crucial in order to restrain the spread of this virus and to perform medical treatment quickly for patients affected. However, the limited supply of RT-PCR as a diagnosis tool caused greatly delay in obtaining examination results of the suspected patients. Previous research stated that using radiologic images could be utilized to detect COVID-19 before the symptoms appeared. With the rapid development of Artificial intelligence in medical imaging in recent years, deep learning as the core of this technology could achieve human-level-performance in diagnostic accuracy. In this paper, deep learning was implemented to detect COVID-19 using a chest X-ray dataset. The proposed model employed a multi-kernel convolution neural network (CNN) block combined with pre-trained ResNet-34 to overcome an imbalanced dataset. The model block adopted different kernel sizes as follows 1x1, 3x3, 5x5, and 7x7. The findings show that the proposed model is capable of performing binary and three class classification tasks with an accuracy of 100% and 93.51% in the validation phase and 95% and 83% in the test phase, respectively.