Detection of Post COVID-Pneumonia Using Histogram Equalization, CLAHE Deep Learning Techniques

Pneumonia, also known as bronchitis, is caused by bacteria, viruses, or fungi. Pneumonia can be fatal to an infected person because the lungs cannot exchange air. The disease primarily affects infants and people over the age of 65. Every year, nearly 4 million people are killed by the disease, which affects an estimated 420 million people. It is critical to detect and diagnose this condition as soon as possible. Diagnosing the condition using the patient's x-ray is the most effective method. Experienced radiologists will use a chest x-ray of the affected patient to make this informed decision. Recently, coronavirus is a contagious viral disease caused by the SARSCoV2 virus. This virus affects the human respiratory system. The virus also causes pneumonia (COVID pneumonia), which is far more dangerous than normal pneumonia. The main purpose of this task is to study and compare several deep learning enhancement techniques applied to medical x-ray and CT scan images for the detection of COVID19 (pneumonia). A convolutional neural network (CNN) is used to design a model that can distinguish between COVID19 pneumonia and normal pneumonia. In addition, image enhancement techniques (histogram equalization (HE), contrast-limited adaptive histogram equalization (CLAHE)) have been processed against the dataset to find more efficient methods and models for detecting pneumonia. A dataset of 6432 CXRs were used - 576 COVID pneumonia CXRs, 1583 normal pneumonia CXRs, and 4273 healthy lung CXRs. Based on the results, it was observed that the equalized histogram and the equalized dataset of CLAHE run faster than the original dataset. This requires a computer-aided diagnosis (CAD) system that can distinguish between COVID pneumonia, normal pneumonia, and healthy lungs. In addition, the improved VGG16 achieved 96% accuracy in the detection of X-ray images of COVID19 - pneumonia.