Diagnosis of COVID-19 from X-rays Using Combined CNN-RNN Architecture with Transfer Learning

Abstract The confrontation of COVID-19 pandemic has become one of the promising challenges of the world healthcare. Accurate and fast diagnosis of COVID-19 cases is essential for correct medical treatment to control this pandemic. Compared with the reverse-transcription polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR) method, chest radiography imaging techniques are shown to be more effective to detect coronavirus. For the limitation of available medical images, transfer learning is better suited to classify patterns in medical images. This paper presents a combined architecture of convolutional neural network (CNN) and recurrent neural network (RNN) to diagnose COVID-19 from chest X-rays. The deep transfer techniques used in this experiment are VGG19, DenseNet121, InceptionV3, and Inception-ResNetV2. CNN is used to extract complex features from samples and…