Fine-Tuning Convolutional Neural Networks for COVID-19 Detection from Chest X-ray Images

CCTCOVID: COVID-19 detection from chest X-ray images using Compact Convolutional Transformers

COVID-19 is a novel virus that attacks the upper respiratory tract and the lungs. Its person-to-person transmissibility is considerably rapid and this has caused serious problems in approximately every facet of individuals' lives. While some infected individuals may remain completely asymptomatic, others have been frequently witnessed to have mild to severe symptoms. In addition to this, thousands of death cases around the globe indicated that detecting COVID-19 is an urgent demand in the communities. Practically, this is prominently done with the help of screening medical images such as Computed Tomography (CT) and X-ray images. However, the cumbersome clinical procedures and a large number of daily cases have imposed great challenges on medical practitioners. Deep Learning-based approaches have demonstrated a profound potential in a wide range of medical tasks. As a result, we introduce a transformer-based method for automatically detecting COVID-19 from X-ray images using Compact Convolutional Transformers (CCT). Our extensive experiments prove the efficacy of the proposed method with an accuracy of 99.22% which outperforms the previous works.

A Review Study of the Deep Learning Techniques used for the Classification of Chest Radiological Images for COVID-19 Diagnosis

In the fight against COVID-19, the immediate and accurate screening of infected patients is of great significance. Chest X-Ray (CXR) and Computed Tomography (CT) screening play an important role in the diagnosis of COVID-19. Studies showed that changes occur in Chest Radiological images before the beginning of COVID-19 symptoms for some patients, and the symptoms of COVID-19 and other lung diseases can be similar in their very early stages. Further, it is crucial to effectively distinguish COVID-19 patients from healthy people, and patients with other lung diseases as soon as possible, otherwise inaccurate diagnosis may expose more people to the coronavirus. Many researchers have developed end-to-end deep learning techniques for the classification of COVID-19 patients without manual feature engineering. In this paper, we review the different deep learning techniques that have been used to analyze Chest X-Ray and Computed Tomography scans to classify patients with Covid-19. In addition, we also summarize the common public datasets, challenges, limitations, and possible future work. This review paper is extremely valuable as it confirms that (1) Deep Learning models are effective in classifying chest X-Ray images provided the training dataset is sufficiently large. (2) Data augmentation and generative adversarial networks (GANs) solve the small training dataset problem. (3) Transfer learning methods greatly enhanced the extraction and selection of features that were important for chest image classification. (4) Hyperparameter tuning was valuable for increasing the deep learning model accuracies to generally more than 97%. Our review study helps new researchers identify the gaps and opportunities for further or new research.

COVID-19 detection on Chest X-ray images: A comparison of CNN architectures and ensembles

COVID-19 quickly became a global pandemic after only four months of its first detection. It is crucial to detect this disease as soon as possible to decrease its spread. The use of chest X-ray (CXR) images became an effective screening strategy, complementary to the reverse transcription-polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR). Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) are often used for automatic image classification and they can be very useful in CXR diagnostics. In this paper, 21 different CNN architectures are tested and compared in the task of identifying COVID-19 in CXR images. They were applied to the COVIDx8B dataset, a large COVID-19 dataset with 16,352 CXR images coming from patients of at least 51 countries. Ensembles of CNNs were also employed and they showed better efficacy than individual instances. The best individual CNN instance results were achieved by DenseNet169, with an accuracy of 98.15% and an F1 score of 98.12%. These were further increased to 99.25% and 99.24%, respectively, through an ensemble with five instances of DenseNet169. These results are higher than those obtained in recent works using the same dataset.

Big Transfer Learning for Fine Art Classification

Automatic classification and retrieval of fine art collections have received much attention in recent years. In this article, we explore the applicability of convolutional neural networks (CNNs) for art-related image classification tasks. To examine how hyperparameters affect model performance, we use different hyperparameters in our experiments and find that a higher resolution and appropriate training steps with mix-up can improve model performance. To determine how transfer learning affects the final results, we systematically compare the efforts of five weight initializations of the models for different tasks. We show that fine-tuning networks pretrained on a larger dataset have better generalizability. This phenomenon shows the a priori knowledge that models learn in the real world also applies to the art world, and we call this method as big transfer learning (BiT). Through extensive experiments on fine art classification, we demonstrate that the proposed transfer learning approach outperforms the previous work by a large margin and achieves state-of-the-art performance in the art field. Furthermore, to show how computers capture features in paintings to make classifications, we visualized the results of different classification tasks to help us understand the operation mechanism of the models. Additionally, we use our models to retrieve paintings by analyzing different image similarity aspects. The results show that models can be employed to retrieve paintings even if they are computer-generated.

Data-Driven Analytics Leveraging Artificial Intelligence in the Era of COVID-19: An Insightful Review of Recent Developments

This paper presents the role of artificial intelligence (AI) and other latest technologies that were employed to fight the recent pandemic (i.e., novel coronavirus disease-2019 (COVID-19)). These technologies assisted the early detection/diagnosis, trends analysis, intervention planning, healthcare burden forecasting, comorbidity analysis, and mitigation and control, to name a few. The key-enablers of these technologies was data that was obtained from heterogeneous sources (i.e., social networks (SN), internet of (medical) things (IoT/IoMT), cellular networks, transport usage, epidemiological investigations, and other digital/sensing platforms). To this end, we provide an insightful overview of the role of data-driven analytics leveraging AI in the era of COVID-19. Specifically, we discuss major services that AI can provide in the context of COVID-19 pandemic based on six grounds, (i) AI role in seven different epidemic containment strategies (a.k.a non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs)), (ii) AI role in data life cycle phases employed to control pandemic via digital solutions, (iii) AI role in performing analytics on heterogeneous types of data stemming from the COVID-19 pandemic, (iv) AI role in the healthcare sector in the context of COVID-19 pandemic, (v) general-purpose applications of AI in COVID-19 era, and (vi) AI role in drug design and repurposing (e.g., iteratively aligning protein spikes and applying three/four-fold symmetry to yield a low-resolution candidate template) against COVID-19. Further, we discuss the challenges involved in applying AI to the available data and privacy issues that can arise from personal data transitioning into cyberspace. We also provide a concise overview of other latest technologies that were increasingly applied to limit the spread of the ongoing pandemic. Finally, we discuss the avenues of future research in the respective area. This insightful review aims to highlight existing AI-based technological developments and future research dynamics in this area.