Automatic diagnosis of stage of COVID-19 patients using an ensemble of transfer learning with convolutional neural networks based on computed tomography images

Diagnosis of the stage of COVID‑19 patients using the chest computed tomography (CT) can help the physician in making decisions on the length of time required for hospitalization and adequate selection of patient care. This diagnosis requires very expert radiologists who are not available everywhere and is also tedious and subjective. The aim of this study is to propose an advanced machine learning system to diagnose the stages of COVID‑19 patients including normal, early, progressive, peak, and absorption stages based on lung CT images, using an automatic deep transfer learning ensemble.

Different strategies of deep transfer learning were used which were based on pretrained convolutional neural networks (CNNs). Pretrained CNNs were fine‑tuned on the chest CT images, and then, the extracted features were classified by a softmax layer. Finally, we built an ensemble method based on majority voting of the best deep transfer learning outputs to further improve the recognition performance.

The experimental results from 689 cases indicate that the ensemble of three deep transfer learning outputs based on EfficientNetB4, InceptionResV3, and NasNetlarge has the highest results in diagnosing the stage of COVID‑19 with an accuracy of 91.66%.

The proposed method can be used for the classification of the stage of COVID‑19 disease with good accuracy to help the physician in making decisions on patient care.