Pre-trained deep learning models in automatic COVID-19 diagnosis

Coronavirus disease (COVID-19) is a devastating pandemic in the history of mankind. It is a highly contagious flu that can spread from human to human without revealing any symptoms. For being so contagious, detecting patients with it and isolating them has become the primary concern for healthcare professionals. This study presented an alternative way to identify COVID-19 patients by doing an automatic examination of chest X-rays of the patients. To develop such an efficient system, six pre-trained deep learning models were used. Those models were: VGG16, InceptionV3, Xception, DenseNet201, InceptionResNetV2, and EfficientNetB4. Those models were developed on two open-source datasets that have chest X-rays of patients diagnosed with COVID-19. Among the models, EfficientNetB4 achieved better performances on both datasets with 96% and 97% of accuracies. The empirical results were also exemplary. This type of automated system can help us fight this dangerous virus outbreak