LungAI: A Deep Learning Convolutional Neural Network for Automated Detection of COVID-19 from Posteroanterior Chest X-Rays

COVID-19 is an infectious disease caused by the Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2). As of December 2020, more than 72 million cases have been reported worldwide. The standard method of diagnosis is by Real-Time Reverse Transcription Polymerase Chain Reaction (rRT-PCR) from a Nasopharyngeal Swab. Currently, there is no vaccine or specific antiviral treatment for COVID-19. Due to rate of spreading of the disease manual detection among people is becoming more difficult because of a clear lack of testing capability. Thus there was need of a quick and reliable yet non-labour intensive detection technique. Considering that the virus predominantly appears in the form of a lung based abnormality I made use of Chest X-Rays as our primary mode of detection. For this detection system we made use of Posteroanterior (PA) Chest X-rays of people infected with Bacterial Pneumonia (2780 Images), Viral Pneumonia (1493 Images), Covid-19 (729 Images) as well as those of perfectly Healthy Individuals (1583 Images) procured from various Publicly Available Datasets and Radiological Societies. LungAI is a novel Convolutional Neural Network based on a Hybrid of the DarkNet and AlexNet architecture. The network was trained on 80% of the dataset with 20% kept for validation. The proposed Coronavirus Detection Model performed exceedingly well with an accuracy of 99.16%, along with a Sensitivity value of 99.31% and Specificity value of 99.14%. Thus LungAI has the potential to prove useful in managing the current Pandemic Situation by providing a reliable and fast alternative to Coronavirus Detection given strong results.