Synthesizing realistic images for improved early detection of novel pandemics: A GAN enabled approach

<h2>Abstract</h2> Infectious diseases like the novel Coronavirus (COVID-19) affect millions of individuals if not managed well in time. Thus, to reduce the transmission rate, effective diagnostic techniques must be identified. Early detection and diagnosis may be aided by Artificial Intelligence (AI) based automated diagnostics; however, these algorithms need a lot of pertinent data to be trained. In the early stages of a pandemic, gathering a lot of data is never an easy task. This presents challenges for accurate automatic diagnosis of such infectious diseases. To address this issue, a customized Generative Adversarial Networks (GAN) based architecture i. e., CoroWGAN-GP is proposed to synthesize images and to expand datasets. A dataset of 588 images with COVID-19, Normal, and Viral Pneumonia categories (taken from Cohen's repository [1]) was expanded using the proposed CoroWGAN-GP approach and used to train a proposed customized deep CNN architecture i. e., DeepCNN-CovNet19. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed model achieved a considerable detection accuracy. i. e., 98.0 % in detecting the disease. The effectiveness of the proposed method was further evaluated by comparing its results with the state-of-the-art methods in the literature. Comparative analyses indicate that the proposed approach offers a promising solution for the accurate diagnosis of COVID-19-like pandemics.