Convolutional neural networks for the diagnosis and prognosis of the coronavirus disease pandemic

Sneha Kugunavar, C. J. Prabhakar

A neural network is one of the current trends in deep learning, which is increasingly gaining attention owing to its contribution in transforming the different facets of human life. It also paves a way to approach the current crisis caused by the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) from all scientific directions. Convolutional neural network (CNN), a type of neural network, is extensively applied in the medical field, and is particularly useful in the current COVID-19 pandemic. In this article, we present the application of CNNs for the diagnosis and prognosis of COVID-19 using X-ray and computed tomography (CT) images of COVID-19 patients. The CNN models discussed in this review were mainly developed for the detection, classification, and segmentation of COVID-19 images. The base models used for detection and classification were AlexNet, Visual Geometry Group Network with 16 layers, residual network, DensNet, GoogLeNet, MobileNet, Inception, and extreme Inception. U-Net and voxel-based broad learning network were used for segmentation. Even with limited datasets, these methods proved to be beneficial for efficiently identifying the occurrence of COVID-19. To further validate these observations, we conducted an experimental study using a simple CNN framework for the binary classification of COVID-19 CT images. We achieved an accuracy of 93% with an F1-score of 0.93. Thus, with the availability of improved medical image datasets, it is evident that CNNs are very useful for the efficient diagnosis and prognosis of COVID-19.