Detection of Coronavirus (COVID-19) Associated Pneumonia based on Generative Adversarial Networks and a Fine-Tuned Deep Transfer Learning Model using Chest X-ray Dataset

The COVID-19 coronavirus is one of the devastating viruses according to the world health organization. This novel virus leads to pneumonia, which is an infection that inflames the lungs' air sacs of a human. One of the methods to detect those inflames is by using x-rays for the chest. In this paper, a pneumonia chest x-ray detection based on generative adversarial networks (GAN) with a fine-tuned deep transfer learning for a limited dataset will be presented. The use of GAN positively affects the proposed model robustness and made it immune to the overfitting problem and helps in generating more images from the dataset. The dataset used in this research consists of 5863 X-ray images with two categories: Normal and Pneumonia. This research uses only 10% of the dataset for training data and generates 90% of images using GAN to prove the efficiency of the proposed model. Through the paper, AlexNet, GoogLeNet, Squeeznet, and Resnet18 are selected as deep transfer learning models to detect the pneumonia from chest x-rays. Those models are selected based on their small number of layers on their architectures, which will reflect in reducing the complexity of the models and the consumed memory and time. Using a combination of GAN and deep transfer models proved it is efficiency according to testing accuracy measurement. The research concludes that the Resnet18 is the most appropriate deep transfer model according to testing accuracy measurement and achieved 99% with the other performance metrics such as precision, recall, and F1 score while using GAN as an image augmenter. Finally, a comparison result was carried out at the end of the research with related work which used the same dataset except that this research used only 10% of original dataset. The presented work achieved a superior result than the related work in terms of testing accuracy.