On Transfer Learning for Classifying COVID-19 in Chest X-Ray Images

Abstract

COVID-19 is an exceptionally infectious disease caused by severe acute respiratory syndrome. The illness has spread itself worldwide rapidly and can lead to death only in a few days. In this context, investigating fast ways of detection that help physicians in the decision-making process is essential to help in the task of saving lives. This work investigates fourteen convolutional neural network architectures using transfer learning. We used a database composed of 2,928 x-ray images divided into three classes: Normal, COVID-19, and Viral Pneumonia. Results showed that DenseNet169 presented the best results regarding classification reaching a mean accuracy of 94%, a precision of 97.6%, a recall of 95.6%, and an F1-score of 96,1%, approximately.