Efficient mask region-based convolutional neural network-based architecture for COVID-19 detection from computed tomography data

The worldwide effect of the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic has been catastrophic, leading to a significant number of fatalities worldwide. In response to the outbreak, health care institutions have proposed the use of chest computed tomography (CT) as an important diagnosis tool for rapid diagnosis, leveraging deep learning approaches for disease detection. This paper aims to progress a robust methodology towards accurate diagnosis of COVID-19 based on deep learning approaches with chest CT images. We propose a mask region-based convolutional neural network (Mask R-CNN) model architecture that is well-trained and used to discriminate between COVID-19-infected and uninfected cases. In order to improve feature extraction, the proposed model incorporates a fuzzy color enhancement preprocessing technique that reduces image fuzziness and increases contrast. A publicly available chest CT dataset is considered for quantitative evaluation of the proposed architecture model, which includes various frontal image views of COVID-19 and non-COVID-19 cases. The proposed approach yielded an accuracy of 98.8% with 98.4% precision and 98.5% recall. Additionally, the proposed model architecture has been quantitatively evaluated in comparison with benchmark approaches, yielding superior performance in terms of conventional evaluation metrics.