A Robust Hybrid Machine and Deep Learning-based Model for Classification and Identification of Chest X-ray Images

Successful medical treatment for patients with COVID-19 requires rapid and accurate diagnosis. Fighting the COVID-19 pandemic requires an automated system to diagnose the virus on Chest X-Ray (CXR) images. CXR images are frequently used in healthcare as they offer the potential for rapid and accurate disease diagnosis. SARS-CoV-2 targets the respiratory system, resulting in pneumonia with additional symptoms, such as dry cough, fatigue, and fever, which could be misdiagnosed as pneumonia, TB, or lung cancer. There is difficulty in differentiating the features of COVID-19 from other diseases that have similarities in CXR images. Automated Computer-Aided Diagnosis (CAD) systems incorporate machine or deep learning methods to improve efficiency and accuracy. CNNs are among the most widely used methods, as they have shown encouraging accuracy in identifying COVID-19 in CXR images. This study presents a hybrid deep learning model to provide faster diagnosis of COVID-19 infection using CXR images. The Densenet201 model was used for feature extraction and a Multi-Layer Perceptron (MLP) was used for classification. The proposed method achieved 98.82% accuracy and similar sensitivity, specificity, precision, recall, and F1 score. These results are promising when compared to other DL models trained in similar datasets.