An Intelligent Edge-as-a-Service Framework to Combat COVID-19 Using Deep Learning Techniques

This study proposes and develops a secured edge-assisted deep learning (DL)-based automatic COVID-19 detection framework that utilizes the cloud and edge computing assistance as a service with a 5G network and blockchain technologies. The development of artificial intelligence methods through services at the edge plays a significant role in serving many applications in different domains. Recently, some DL approaches have been proposed to successfully detect COVID-19 by analyzing chest X-ray (CXR) images in the cloud and edge computing environments. However, the existing DL methods leverage only local and small training datasets. To overcome these limitations, we employed the edges to perform three tasks. The first task was to collect data from different hospitals and send them to a global cloud to train a DL model on massive datasets. The second task was to integrate all the trained models on the cloud to detect COVID-19 cases automatically. The third task was to retrain the trained model on specific COVID-19 data locally at hospitals to improve and generalize the trained model. A feature-level fusion and reduction were adopted for model performance enhancement. Experimental results on a public CXR dataset demonstrated an improvement against recent related work, achieving the quality-of-service requirements.