An Efficient CNN-Based Automated Diagnosis Framework from COVID-19 CT Images

Corona Virus Disease-2019(COVID-19)continues to spread rapidly in the world.It has dramatically affected daily lives,public health,and the world economy.This paper presents a segmentation and classification framework of COVID-19 images based on deep learning.Firstly,the classification process is employed to discriminate between COVID-19,non-COVID,and pneumonia by Convolutional Neural Network(CNN).Then,the segmentation process is applied for COVID-19 and pneumonia CT images.Finally,the resulting segmented images are used to identify the infected region,whether COVID-19 or pneumonia.The proposed CNN consists of four Convolutional(Conv)layers,four batch normalization layers,and four Rectified Linear Units(ReLUs).The sizes of Conv layer used filters are 8,16,32,and 64.Four maxpooling layers are employed with a stride of 2 and a 2×2 window.The classification layer comprises a Fully-Connected(FC)layer and a soft-max activation function used to take the classification decision.A novel saliencybased region detection algorithm and an active contour segmentation strategy are applied to segment COVID-19 and pneumonia CT images.The acquired findings substantiate the efficacy of the proposed framework for helping the specialists in automated diagnosis applications.