Detection of Covid-19 from Chest CT Images Using Xception Architecture: A Deep Transfer Learning Based Approach

Covid-19 infection, which first appeared in Wuhan, China in December 2019, affected the whole world in a short time like three months. The disease caused by the virus called SARSCoV-2 affects many organs, especially the lungs, brain, liver and kidney, and causes a large number of deaths. Early detection of Covid-19 using computer-aided methods will ensure that the patient reaches the right treatment without wasting time, and the spread of the disease will be controlled. This study proposes a solution for detecting Covid-19 using chest computed tomography (CT) scan images. Firstly, features are extracted by Xception network, convolutional neural network (CNN) based transfer learning method, then classification process is performed with a fully connected neural network (FCNN) added at the end of this architecture. The classification model was tested ten times on the accessible SARS-CoV-2-CTscan dataset containing 2482 CT images labelled as covid and non-covid. The precision, recall, f1-score and accuracy metrics were used as performance measures; and ROC curve related to the model was drawn. While obtaining an average of 98.89% accuracy, in the best case, 99.59% classification performance was achieved. Xception outperforms other methods in the literature. The results promise that the proposed method can be evaluated as a clinical option helping experts in the detection of Covid-19 from CT images.

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