Applying Different Machine Learning Techniques for Prediction of COVID-19 Severity

Due to the increase in the number of patients who died as a result of the SARS-CoV-2 virus around the world, researchers are working tirelessly to find technological solutions to help doctors in their daily work. Fast and accurate Artificial Intelligence (AI) techniques are needed to assist doctors in their decisions to predict the severity and mortality risk of a patient. Early prediction of patient severity would help in saving hospital resources and decrease the continual death of patients by providing early medication actions. Currently, X-ray images are used as early symptoms in detecting COVID-19 patients. Therefore, in this research, a prediction model has been built to predict different levels of severity risks for the COVID-19 patient based on X-ray images by applying machine learning techniques. To build the proposed model, CheXNet deep pre-trained model and hybrid handcrafted techniques were applied to extract features, two different methods: Principal Component Analysis (PCA) and Recursive Feature Elimination (RFE) were integrated to select the most important features, and then, six machine learning techniques were applied. For handcrafted features, the experiments proved that merging the features that have been selected by PCA and RFE together (PCA + RFE) achieved the best results with all classifiers compared with using all features or using the features selected by PCA or RFE individually. The XGBoost classifier achieved the best performance with the merged (PCA + RFE) features, where it accomplished 97% accuracy, 98% precision, 95% recall, 96% f1-score and 100% roc-auc. Also, SVM carried out the same results with some minor differences, but overall it was a good performance where it accomplished 97% accuracy, 96% precision, 95% recall, 95% f1-score and 99% roc-auc. On the other hand, for pre-trained CheXNet features, Extra Tree and SVM classifiers with RFE achieved 99.6% for all measures.