Res-CovNet: an internet of medical health things driven COVID-19 framework using transfer learning

Abstract

Major countries are globally facing difficult situations due to this pandemic disease, COVID-19. There are high chances of getting false positives and false negatives identifying the COVID-19 symptoms through existing medical practices such as PCR (polymerase chain reaction) and RT-PCR (reverse transcription-polymerase chain reaction). It might lead to a community spread of the disease. The alternative of these tests can be CT (Computer Tomography) imaging or X-rays of the lungs to identify the patient with COVID-19 symptoms more accurately. Furthermore, by using feasible and usable technology to automate the identification of COVID-19, the facilities can be improved. This notion became the basic framework, Res-CovNet, of the implemented methodology, a hybrid methodology to bring different platforms into a single platform. This basic framework is incorporated into IoMT based framework, a web-based service to identify and classify various forms of pneumonia or COVID-19 utilizing chest X-ray images. For the front end, the.NET framework along with C# language was utilized, MongoDB was utilized for the storage aspect, Res-CovNet was utilized for the processing aspect. Deep learning combined with the notion forms a comprehensive implementation of the framework, Res-CovNet, to classify the COVID-19 affected patients from pneumonia-affected patients as both lung imaging looks similar to the naked eye. The implemented framework, Res-CovNet, developed with the technique, transfer learning in which ResNet-50 used as a pre-trained model and then extended with classification layers. The work implemented using the data of X-ray images collected from the various trustable sources that include cases such as normal, bacterial pneumonia, viral pneumonia, and COVID-19, with the overall size of the data is about 5856. The accuracy of the model implemented is about 98.4% in identifying COVID-19 against the normal cases. The accuracy of the model is about 96.2% in the case of identifying COVID-19 against all other cases, as mentioned.