Chest X-ray Classification Using Deep Learning for Automated COVID-19 Screening.

In today's world, we find ourselves struggling to fight one of the worst pandemics in the history of humanity known as COVID-2019 caused by a coronavirus. When the virus reaches the lungs, we observe ground-glass opacity in the chest X-ray due to fibrosis in the lungs. Due to the significant differences between X-ray images of an infected and non-infected person, artificial intelligence techniques can be used to identify the presence and severity of the infection. We propose a classification model that can analyze the chest X-rays and help in the accurate diagnosis of COVID-19. Our methodology classifies the chest X-rays into four classes viz. normal, pneumonia, tuberculosis (TB), and COVID-19. Further, the X-rays indicating COVID-19 are classified on a severity-basis into mild, medium, and severe. The deep learning model used for the classification of pneumonia, TB, and normal is VGG-16 with a test accuracy of 95.9 %. For the segregation of normal pneumonia and COVID-19, the DenseNet-161 was used with a test accuracy of 98.9 %, whereas the ResNet-18 worked best for severity classification achieving a test accuracy up to 76 %. Our approach allows mass screening of the people using X-rays as a primary validation for COVID-19. SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s42979-021-00695-5.

Outbreak Prediction of COVID-19 for Dense and Populated Countries Using Machine Learning.

The Coronavirus Disease-2019 (COVID-19) pandemic persists to have a mortifying impact on the health and well-being of the global population. A continued rise in the number of patients testing positive for COVID-19 has created a lot of stress on governing bodies across the globe and they are finding it difficult to tackle the situation. We have developed an outbreak prediction system for COVID-19 for the top 10 highly and densely populated countries. The proposed prediction models forecast the count of new cases likely to arise for successive 5 days using 9 different machine learning algorithms. A set of models for predicting the rise in new cases, having an average accuracy of 87.9%  ± 3.9% was developed for 10 high population and high density countries. The highest accuracy of 99.93% was achieved for Ethiopia using Auto-Regressive Moving Average (ARMA) averaged over the next 5 days. The proposed prediction models used by us can help stakeholders to be prepared in advance for any sudden rise in outbreak to ensure optimal management of available resources.