Detection of COVID-19 Disease from Chest X-Ray Images: A Deep Transfer Learning Framework

World economy as well as public health have been facing a devastating effect caused by the disease termed as Coronavirus (COVID-19). A significant step of COVID-19 affected patient’s treatment is the faster and accurate detection of the disease which is the motivation of this study. In this paper, implementation of a deep transfer learning-based framework using a pre-trained network (ResNet-50) for detecting COVID-19 from the chest X-rays was done. Our dataset consists of 2905 chest X-ray images of three categories: COVID-19 affected (219 cases), Viral Pneumonia affected (1345 cases), and Normal Chest X-rays (1341 cases). The implemented neural network demonstrates significant performance in classifying the cases with an overall accuracy of 96%. Most importantly, the model has shown a significantly good performance over the current research-based methods in detecting the COVID-19 cases in the test dataset (Precision = 1.00, Recall = 1.00, F1-score = 1.00 and Specificity = 1.00). Therefore, our proposed approach can be adapted as a reliable method for faster and accurate COVID-19 affected case detection.