COVID-19 classification using hybrid deep learning and standard feature extraction techniques

Abstract

There is no doubt that COVID-19 disease rapidly spread all over the world, and effected the daily lives of all of the people. Nowadays, the reverse transcription polymerase chain reaction is the most way used to detect COVID-19 infection. Due to time consumed in this method and material limitation in the hospitals, there is a need for developing a robust decision support system depending on artificial intelligence (AI) techniques to recognize the infection at an early stage from a medical images. The main contribution in this research is to develop a robust hybrid feature extraction method for recognizing the COVID-19 infection. Firstly, we train the Alexnet on the images database and extract the first feature matrix. Then we used discrete wavelet transform (DWT) and principal component analysis (PCA) to extract the second feature matrix from the same images. After that, the desired feature matrices were merged. Finally, support vector machine (SVM) was used to classify the images. Training, validating, and testing of the proposed method were performed. Experimental results gave (97.6%, 98.5%) average accuracy rate on both chest X-ray and computed tomography (CT) images databases. The proposed hybrid method outperform a lot of standard methods and deep learning neural networks like Alexnet, Googlenet and other related methods.