Covid-19 Chest X-Ray Classification using Convolutional Neural Network

COVID-19, or Coronavirus Disease 2019, is an infectious ailment caused by the SARS coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2). Identifying infected individuals poses a challenge due to symptom similarities with other common illnesses like fever and cough. One method to assess infection involves examining chest X-rays, but with the volume of images, misdiagnoses may occur, causing delays. To address this, an automated COVID-19 classification using Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) techniques is proposed. Models like AlexNet, SqueezeNet, MobileNetV2, and ResNet-18 are employed and trained on datasets containing normal and COVID-19 chest X-rays, with efforts to expand and enhance the datasets. In the comparative analysis of pre-trained models for chest X-ray image classification, MobileNetV2 stands out as the superior model, achieving an impressive average accuracy of $96 \%$ alongside equivalent precision, recall, and F1-score metrics. This remarkable performance underscores MobileNetV2’s efficacy in distinguishing between normal and COVID-19 affected images, positioning it as the most suited model for this crucial diagnostic task.