COVID-19 Classification of X-ray Images Using Deep Neural Networks

In the midst of the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) outbreak, chest X-ray (CXR) imaging is playing an important role in the diagnosis and monitoring of patients with COVID-19. Machine learning solutions have been shown to be useful for X-ray analysis and classification in a range of medical contexts. The purpose of this study is to create and evaluate a machine learning model for diagnosis of COVID-19, and to provide a tool for searching for similar patients according to their X-ray scans. In this retrospective study, a classifier was built using a pre-trained deep learning model (ReNet50) and enhanced by data augmentation and lung segmentation to detect COVID-19 in frontal CXR images collected between January 2018 and July 2020 in four hospitals in Israel. A nearest-neighbors algorithm was implemented based on the network results that identifies the images most similar to a given image.