Improved COVID-19 detection using data augmentation Deep Convolution GAN and classifier DenseNet.

Abstract SARS-CoV-2 or severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 is considered to be the cause of Coronavirus (COVID-19) which is a viral disease. The rapid spread of COVID-19 is having a detrimental effect on the global economy and health. A chest X-ray of infected patients can be considered as a crucial step in the battle against COVID-19. On retrospections, it is found that abnormalities exist in chest X-rays of patients suggestive of COVID-19. This sparked the introduction of a variety of deep learning systems and studies which have shown that the accuracy of COVID-19 patient detection through the use of chest X-rays is strongly optimistic. Although there are certain shortcomings like deep learning networks like convolutional neural networks (CNNs) need a substantial amount of training data but the outbreak is recent, so it is large datasets of radiographic images of the COVID-19 infected patients are not available in such a short time. Here, in this research, we present a method to generate synthetic chest X-ray (CXR) images by developing a Deep Convolution Generative Adversarial Network-based model. In addition, we demonstrate that the synthetic images produced from DCGAN can be utilized to enhance the performance of CNN for COVID-19 detection. Classification using CNN alone yielded 85% accuracy. Although there are several models available, we chose MobileNet as it is a lightweight deep neural network, with fewer parameters and higher classification accuracy. Here we are using a deep neural network-based model to diagnose COVID-19 infected patients through radiological imaging of 5,859 Chest X-Ray images. We are using a Deep Convolutional Neural Network and a pre-trained model “DenseNet 121” for two new label classes (COVID-19 and Normal). To improve the classification accuracy, in our work we have further reduced the number of network parameters by introducing dense blocks that are proposed in DenseNets into MobileNet. By adding synthetic images produced by DCGAN, the accuracy increased to 97%. Our goal is to use this method to speed up COVID-19 detection and lead to more robust systems of radiology.