Diagnosis of COVID-19 from X-rays Using Combined CNN-RNN Architecture with Transfer Learning

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Abstract

The confrontation of COVID-19 pandemic has become one of the promising challenges of the world healthcare. Accurate and fast diagnosis of COVID-19 cases is essential for correct medical treatment to control this pandemic. Compared with the reverse-transcription polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR) method, chest radiography imaging techniques are shown to be more effective to detect coronavirus. For the limitation of available medical images, transfer learning is better suited to classify patterns in medical images. This paper presents a combined architecture of convolutional neural network (CNN) and recurrent neural network (RNN) to diagnose COVID-19 from chest X-rays. The deep transfer techniques used in this experiment are VGG19, DenseNet121, InceptionV3, and Inception-ResNetV2. CNN is used to extract complex features from samples and classified them using RNN. The VGG19-RNN architecture achieved the best performance among all the networks in terms of accuracy in our experiments. Finally, Gradient-weighted Class Activation Mapping (Grad-CAM) was used to visualize class-specific regions of images that are responsible to make decision. The system achieved promising results compared to other existing systems and might be validated in the future when more samples would be available. The experiment demonstrated a good alternative method to diagnose COVID-19 for medical staff.

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  1. SciScore for 10.1101/2020.08.24.20181339: (What is this?)

    Please note, not all rigor criteria are appropriate for all manuscripts.

    Table 1: Rigor

    Institutional Review Board Statementnot detected.
    Randomizationnot detected.
    Blindingnot detected.
    Power Analysisnot detected.
    Sex as a biological variablenot detected.

    Table 2: Resources

    Software and Algorithms
    SentencesResources
    Then, 912 augmented images were also collected from Mendeley instead of using data augmentation techniques explicitly [35].
    Mendeley
    suggested: (Mendeley Data, RRID:SCR_002750)
    Finally, 2313 samples of normal and pneumonia cases were obtained from Kaggle [36], [37].
    Kaggle
    suggested: (Kaggle, RRID:SCR_013852)

    Results from OddPub: We did not detect open data. We also did not detect open code. Researchers are encouraged to share open data when possible (see Nature blog).


    Results from LimitationRecognizer: An explicit section about the limitations of the techniques employed in this study was not found. We encourage authors to address study limitations.

    Results from TrialIdentifier: No clinical trial numbers were referenced.


    Results from Barzooka: We did not find any issues relating to the usage of bar graphs.


    Results from JetFighter: Please consider improving the rainbow (“jet”) colormap(s) used on page 12. At least one figure is not accessible to readers with colorblindness and/or is not true to the data, i.e. not perceptually uniform.


    Results from rtransparent:
    • Thank you for including a conflict of interest statement. Authors are encouraged to include this statement when submitting to a journal.
    • Thank you for including a funding statement. Authors are encouraged to include this statement when submitting to a journal.
    • No protocol registration statement was detected.

    About SciScore

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