Metaheuristics based COVID-19 detection using medical images: A review

Many countries in the world have been facing the rapid spread of COVID-19 since February 2020. There is a dire need for efficient and cheap automated diagnosis systems that can reduce the pressure on healthcare systems. Extensive research is being done on the use of image classification for the detection of COVID-19 through X-ray and CT-scan images of patients. Deep learning has been the most popular technique for image classification during the last decade. However, the performance of deep learning-based methods heavily depends on the architecture of the deep neural network. Over the last few years, metaheuristics have gained popularity for optimizing the architecture of deep neural networks. Metaheuristics have been widely used to solve different complex non-linear optimization problems due to their flexibility, simplicity, and problem independence. This paper aims to study the different image classification techniques for chest images, including the applications of metaheuristics for optimization and feature selection of deep learning and machine learning models. The motivation of this study is to focus on applications of different types of metaheuristics for COVID-19 detection and to shed some light on future challenges in COVID-19 detection from medical images. The aim is to inspire researchers to focus their research on overlooked aspects of COVID-19 detection. •Critical analysis of metaheuristics for feature selection in COVID-19 chest image classification.•Details of different COVID-19 chest image datasets along with their reported accuracies.•Discussion on limitations of the existing studies which include the small data set size, noisy data, and class imbalance.•Future research directions such as multiclass classification, scalability, and detection of new COVID-19 variants.