A new modification CNN using VGG19 and ResNet50V2 for classification of COVID-19 from X-ray radiograph images

Abstract

Coronavirus often called COVID-19 is a deadly viral disease that causes as a result of severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus-2 that needs to be identified especially at its early stages, and failure of which can lead to the further spread of the virus. Despite with the huge success recorded towards the use of the original convolutional neural networks (CNN) of deep learning models. However, their architecture needs to be modified to design their modified versions that can have more powerful feature layer extractors to improve their classification performance. This research is aimed at designing a modified CNN of a deep learning model that can be applied to interpret X-rays to classify COVID-19 cases with improved performance. Therefore, we proposed a modified convolutional neural network (shortened as modification CNN) approach that uses X-rays to classify a COVID-19 case by combining VGG19 and ResNet50V2 along with putting additional dense layers to the combined feature layer extractors. The proposed modified CNN achieved 99.24%, 98.89%, 98.90%, 99.58%, and 99.23% of the overall accuracy, precision, specificity, sensitivity, and F1-Score, respectively. This demonstrates that the results of the proposed approach show a promising classification performance in the classification of COVID-19 cases.