Within the Lack of COVID-19 Benchmark Dataset: A Novel GAN with Deep Transfer Learning for Corona-virus Detection in Chest X-ray Images

The coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic is putting healthcare systems across the world under unprecedented and increasing pressure according to the World Health Organization (WHO). With the advances in computer algorithms and especially Artificial Intelligence, the detection of this type of virus in the early stages will help in fast recovery and help in releasing the pressure off healthcare systems. In this paper, a GAN with deep transfer learning for coronavirus detection in chest x-ray images is presented. The lack of benchmark datasets for COVID-19 especially in chest x-rays images is the main motivation of this research. The main idea is to collect all the possible images for COVID-19 that exists until the writing of this research and use the GAN network to generate more images to help in the detection of the virus from the available x-rays images with the highest accuracy possible. The dataset used in this research was collected from different sources and it is available for researchers to download and use it. The number of images in the collected dataset is 307 images for four different types of classes. The classes are the COVID-19, normal, pneumonia bacterial, and pneumonia virus. The dataset is divided into 90% for the GAN and the training and the validation phase, while 10% used in the testing phase. The GAN helps in generating more images from the original dataset to be 30 times larger than the originally collected dataset. The GAN also help in overcoming the overfitting problem and made the proposed model more robust. Three deep transfer models are selected in this research for investigation. The models are the Alexnet, Googlenet, and Restnet18. Those models are selected based on their small number of layers on their architectures, which will reflect in reducing the complexity of the models and the consumed memory and time. Using a combination of GAN and deep transfer models prove it is efficiency according to validation, testing accuracy, and performance measurements such as precision, recall, and F1 score. Three case scenarios are tested through the paper, the first scenario which includes 4 classes from the dataset, while the second scenario includes 3 classes and the third scenario includes 2 classes. All the scenarios include the COVID-19 class as it is the main target of this research to be detected. In the first scenario, the Googlenet is selected to be the main deep transfer model as it achieves 80.6% in testing accuracy. In the second scenario, the Alexnet is selected to be the main deep transfer model as it achieves 85.2% in testing accuracy, while in the third scenario which includes 2 classes (COVID-19, and normal), Googlenet is selected to be the main deep transfer model as it achieves 100% in testing accuracy and 99.9% in the validation accuracy. All the performance measurement strengthen the obtained results through the research. Finally, this research may be considered one of the first trails to use GAN and deep transfer models together to help in detecting coronaviruses (COVID-19) within the absence of a benchmark dataset around the world, especially in x-rays chest images.