CoviDetector: A transfer learning-based semi supervised approach to detect Covid-19 using CXR images

COVID-19 was one of the deadliest and most infectious illnesses of this century. Research has been done to decrease pandemic deaths and slow down its spread. COVID-19 detection investigations have utilised Chest X-ray (CXR) images with deep learning techniques with its sensitivity in identifying pneumonic alterations. However, CXR images are not publicly available due to users’ privacy concerns, resulting in a challenge to train a highly accurate deep learning model from scratch. Therefore, we proposed CoviDetector, a new semi-supervised approach based on transfer learning and clustering, which displays improved performance and requires less training data. CXR images are given as input to this model, and individuals are categorised into three classes: (1) COVID-19 positive; (2) Viral pneumonia; and (3) Normal. The performance of CoviDetector has been evaluated on four different datasets, achieving over 99% accuracy on them. Additionally, we generate heatmaps utilising Grad-CAM and overlay them on the CXR images to present the highlighted areas that were deciding factors in detecting COVID-19. Finally, we developed an Android app to offer a user-friendly interface. We release the code, datasets and results’ scripts of CoviDetector for reproducibility purposes; they are available at: https://github.com/dasanik2001/CoviDetector •CoviDetector is new semi-supervised approach based on transfer learning & clustering.•CoviDetector generates models with improved accuracy and require less training data.•CXR images are given to the deep learning model to evaluate CoviDetector.•CoviDetector utilises the GradCam to interpret the output in a graphical form.•Developed an Android app to offer a user-friendly interface.