The COVID-19 virus has caused a worldwide pandemic, affecting numerous individuals and accounting for more than a million deaths. The countries of the world had to declare complete lockdown when the coronavirus led to community spread. Although the real-time Polymerase Chain Reaction (RT-PCR) test is the gold-standard test for COVID-19 screening, it is not satisfactorily accurate and sensitive. On the other hand, Computer Tomography (CT) scan images are much more sensitive and can be suitable for COVID-19 detection. To this end, in this paper, we develop a fully automated method for fast COVID-19 screening by using chest CT-scan images employing Deep Learning techniques. For this supervised image classification problem, a bootstrap aggregating or Bagging ensemble of three transfer learning models, namely, Inception v3, ResNet34 and DenseNet201, has been used to boost the performance of the individual models. The proposed framework, called ET-NET, has been evaluated on a publicly available dataset, achieving 97.81 ± 0.53 % accuracy, 97.77 ± 0.58 % precision, 97.81 ± 0.52 % sensitivity and 97.77 ± 0.57 % specificity on 5-fold cross-validation outperforming the state-of-the-art method on the same dataset by 1.56%. The relevant codes for the proposed approach are accessible in: https://github.com/Rohit-Kundu/ET-NET_Covid-Detection.
COVID-19 has crippled the world's healthcare systems, setting back the economy and taking the lives of several people. Although potential vaccines are being tested and supplied around the world, it will take a long time to reach every human being, more so with new variants of the virus emerging, enforcing a lockdown-like situation on parts of the world. Thus, there is a dire need for early and accurate detection of COVID-19 to prevent the spread of the disease, even more. The current gold-standard RT-PCR test is only 71% sensitive and is a laborious test to perform, leading to the incapability of conducting the population-wide screening. To this end, in this paper, we propose an automated COVID-19 detection system that uses CT-scan images of the lungs for classifying the same into COVID and Non-COVID cases. The proposed method applies an ensemble strategy that generates fuzzy ranks of the base classification models using the Gompertz function and fuses the decision scores of the base models adaptively to make the final predictions on the test cases. Three transfer learning-based convolutional neural network models are used, namely VGG-11, Wide ResNet-50-2, and Inception v3, to generate the decision scores to be fused by the proposed ensemble model. The framework has been evaluated on two publicly available chest CT scan datasets achieving state-of-the-art performance, justifying the reliability of the model. The relevant source codes related to the present work is available in: GitHub.