CP_DeepNet: a novel automated system for COVID-19 and pneumonia detection through lung X-rays

In recent years, the COVID-19 outbreak has affected humanity across the globe. The frequent symptoms of COVID-19 are identical to the normal flu, such as fever and cough. COVID-19 disseminates rapidly, and it has become a prominent cause of mortality. Nowadays, the new wave of COVID-19 has created significant impacts in China. This virus can have detrimental effects on people of all ages, particularly the elderly, due to their weak immune systems. The real-time polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR) examination is typically performed for the identification of coronavirus. RT-PCR is an expensive and time requiring method, accompanied by a significant rate of false negative detections. Therefore, it is mandatory to develop an inexpensive, fast, and reliable method to detect COVID-19. X-ray images are generally utilized to detect diverse respiratory conditions like pulmonary infections, breathlessness syndrome, lung cancer, air collection in spaces of the lungs, etc. This study has also utilized a chest X-ray dataset to identify COVID-19 and pneumonia. In this research work, we proposed a novel deep learning model CP_DeepNet, which is based on a pre-trained deep learning model such as SqueezeNet, and further added three blocks of convolutional layers to it for assessing the classification efficacy. Furthermore, we employed a data augmentation method for generating more images to overcome the problem of model overfitting. We utilized COVID-19 radiograph dataset for evaluating the performance of the proposed model. To elaborate further, we obtained significant results with accuracy of 99.32%, a precision of 100%, a recall of 99%, a specificity of 99.2%, an area under the curve of 99.78%, and an F1-score of 99.49% on CP_DeepNet for the binary classification of COVID-19 and normal class. We also employed CP_DeepNet for the multiclass classification of COVID-19, pneumonia, and normal person, in which CP_DeepNet achieved accuracy, precision, recall, specificity, area under curve, and F1-score of 99.62%, 99.79%, 99.52%, 99.69, 99.62, and 99.72%, respectively. Comparative analysis of experimental results with different preexisting techniques shows that the proposed model is more dependable as compared to RT-PCR and other prevailing modern techniques for the detection of COVID-19.