Development of a clinical decision support system for the early detection of COVID-19 using deep learning based on chest radiographic images

To control the spread of the COVID-19 virus and to gain critical time in controlling the spread of the disease, rapid and accurate diagnostic methods based on artificial intelligence are urgently needed. In this article, we propose a clinical decision support system for the early detection of COVID 19 using deep learning based on chest radiographic images. For this we will develop an in-depth learning method which could extract the graphical characteristics of COVID-19 in order to provide a clinical diagnosis before the test of the pathogen. For this, we collected 100 images of cases of COVID-19 confirmed by pathogens, 100 images diagnosed with typical viral pneumonia and 100 images of normal cases. The architecture of the proposed model first goes through a preprocessing of the input images followed by an increase in data. Then the model begins a step to extract the characteristics followed by the learning step. Finally, the model begins a classification and prediction process with a fully connected network formed of several classifiers. Deep learning and classification were carried out using the VGG convolutional neural network. The proposed model achieved an accuracy of 92.5% in internal validation and 87.5% in external validation. For the AUC criterion we obtained a value of 97% in internal validation and 95% in external validation. Regarding the sensitivity criterion, we obtained a value of 92% in internal validation and 87% in external validation. The results obtained by our model in the test phase show that our model is very effective in detecting COVID-19 and can be offered to health communities as a precise, rapid and effective clinical decision support system in COVID-19 detection.