A Novel Framework Based on Deep Learning and ANOVA Feature Selection Method for Diagnosis of COVID-19 Cases from Chest X-Ray Images

Background and Objective. The new coronavirus disease (known as COVID-19) was first identified in Wuhan and quickly spread worldwide, wreaking havoc on the economy and people’s everyday lives. As the number of COVID-19 cases is rapidly increasing, a reliable detection technique is needed to identify affected individuals and care for them in the early stages of COVID-19 and reduce the virus’s transmission. The most accessible method for COVID-19 identification is Reverse Transcriptase-Polymerase Chain Reaction (RT-PCR); however, it is time-consuming and has false-negative results. These limitations encouraged us to propose a novel framework based on deep learning that can aid radiologists in diagnosing COVID-19 cases from chest X-ray images. Methods. In this paper, a pretrained network, DenseNet169, was employed to extract features from X-ray images. Features were chosen by a feature selection method, i.e., analysis of variance (ANOVA), to reduce computations and time complexity while overcoming the curse of dimensionality to improve accuracy. Finally, selected features were classified by the eXtreme Gradient Boosting (XGBoost). The ChestX-ray8 dataset was employed to train and evaluate the proposed method. Results and Conclusion. The proposed method reached 98.72% accuracy for two-class classification (COVID-19, No-findings) and 92% accuracy for multiclass classification (COVID-19, No-findings, and Pneumonia). The proposed method’s precision, recall, and specificity rates on two-class classification were 99.21%, 93.33%, and 100%, respectively. Also, the proposed method achieved 94.07% precision, 88.46% recall, and 100% specificity for multiclass classification. The experimental results show that the proposed framework outperforms other methods and can be helpful for radiologists in the diagnosis of COVID-19 cases.