A Hybrid Approach for COVID-19 Detection: Combining Wasserstein GAN with Transfer Learning

COVID-19 is extremely contagious and its rapid growth has drawn attention towards its early diagnosis. Early diagnosis of COVID-19 enables healthcare professionals and government authorities to break the chain of transition and flatten the epidemic curve. With the number of cases accelerating across the developed world, COVID-19 induced Viral Pneumonia cases is a big challenge. Overlapping of COVID-19 cases with Viral Pneumonia and other lung infections with limited dataset and long training hours is a serious problem to cater. Limited amount of data often results in over-fitting models and due to this reason, model does not predict generalized results. To fill this gap, we proposed GAN-based approach to synthesize images which later fed into the deep learning models to classify images of COVID-19, Normal, and Viral Pneumonia. Specifically, customized Wasserstein GAN is proposed to generate 19% more Chest X-ray images as compare to the real images. This expanded dataset is then used to train four proposed deep learning models: VGG-16, ResNet-50, GoogLeNet and MNAST. The result showed that expanded dataset utilized deep learning models to deliver high classification accuracies. In particular, VGG-16 achieved highest accuracy of 99.17% among all four proposed schemes. Rest of the models like ResNet-50, GoogLeNet and MNAST delivered 93.9%, 94.49% and 97.75% testing accuracies respectively. Later, the efficiency of these models is compared with the state of art models on the basis of accuracy. Further, our proposed models can be applied to address the issue of scant datasets for any problem of image analysis.