Modified AlexNet Convolution Neural Network For Covid-19 Detection Using Chest X-ray Images

Abstract

First outbreak of COVID-19 was in the city of Wuhan in China in Dec.2019 and then it becomes a pandemic disease all around the world. World Health Organization (WHO) confirmed more than 5.5 million cases and 341,155 deaths from the disease till the time of writing this paper. This new worldwide disease forced researchers to make more precise way to diagnose COVID-19. In the last decade, medical imaging techniques show its efficiency in helping radiologists to detect and diagnose the diseases. Deep learning and transfer learning algorithms are good techniques to detect disease from different image source types such as X-Ray and CT scan images. In this work we used a deep learning technique based on Convolution Neural Network (CNN) to detect and diagnose COVID-19 disease using Chest X-ray images.  Moreover, the modified AlexNet architecture is proposed in different scenarios were differing from each other in terms of the type of the pooling layers and/or the number of the neurons that have used in the second fully connected layer. The used chest X-ray images are gathered from two COVID-19 X-ray image datasets and one dataset includes large number of normal and pneumonia X-ray images. With the proposed models we obtained the same or even better result than the original AlexNet with having a smaller number of neurons in the second fully connected layer.