Early-stage COVID-19 diagnosis in presence of limited posteroanterior chest X-ray images via novel Pinball-OCSVM

It is evident that the infection with this severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) starts with the upper respiratory tract and as the virus grows, the infection can progress to lungs and develop pneumonia. According to the statistics, approximately 14\% of the infected people with COVID-19 have severe cough and shortness of breath due to pneumonia, because as the viral infection increases, it damages the alveoli (small air sacs) and surrounding tissues. The conventional way of COVID-19 diagnosis is reverse transcription polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR), which is less sensitive during early stages specially, if the patient is asymptomatic that may further lead to more severe pneumonia. To overcome this problem an early diagnosis method is proposed in this paper via one-class classification approach using a novel pinball loss function based one-class support vector machine (PB-OCSVM) considering posteroanterior chest X-ray images. Recently, several automated COVID-19 diagnosis models have been proposed based on various deep learning architectures to identify pulmonary infections using publicly available chest X-ray (CXR) where the presence of less number of COVID-19 positive samples compared to other classes (normal, pneumonia and Tuberculosis) raises the challenge for unbiased learning in deep learning models that has been solved using class balancing techniques which however should be avoided in any medical diagnosis process. Inspired by this phenomenon, this article proposes a novel PB-OCSVM model to work in presence of limited COVID-19 positive CXR samples with objectives to maximize the learning efficiency while minimize the false-positive and false-negative predictions. The proposed model outperformed over recently published deep learning approaches where accuracy, precision, specificity and sensitivity are used as performance measure parameters.