An Exploration into the Detection of COVID-19 from Chest X-ray Scans Using the xRGM-NET Convolutional Neural Network

COVID-19 has spread rapidly across the world since late 2019. As of December, 2021, there are over 250 million documented COVID-19 cases and over 5 million deaths worldwide, which have caused businesses, schools, and government operations to shut down. The most common method of detecting COVID-19 is the RT-PCR swab test, which suffers from a high false-negative rate and a very slow turnaround for results, often up to two weeks. Because of this, specialists often manually review X-ray images of the lungs to detect the presence of COVID-19 with up to 97% accuracy. Neural network algorithms greatly accelerate this review process, analyzing hundreds of X-rays in seconds. Using the Cohen COVID-19 X-ray Database and the NIH ChestX-ray8 Database, we trained and constructed the xRGM-NET convolutional neural network (CNN) to detect COVID-19 in X-ray scans of the lungs. To further aid medical professionals in the manual review of X-rays, we implemented the CNN activation mapping technique Score-CAM, which generates a heat map over an X-ray to illustrate which areas in the scan are most influential over the ultimate diagnosis. xRGM-NET achieved an overall classification accuracy of 97% with a sensitivity of 94% and specificity of 97%. Lightweight models like xRGM-NET can serve to improve the efficiency and accuracy of COVID-19 detection in developing countries or rural areas. In this paper, we report on our model and methods that were developed as part of a STEM enrichment summer program for high school students. We hope that our model and methods will allow other researchers to create lightweight and accurate models as more COVID-19 X-ray scans become available.