Novel Automatic Classification of Human Adult Lung Alveolar Type II Cells Infected with SARS-CoV-2 through the Deep Transfer Learning Approach

Transmission electron microscopy imaging provides a unique opportunity to inspect the detailed structure of infected lung cells with SARS-CoV-2. Unlike previous studies, this novel study aims to investigate COVID-19 classification at the lung cellular level in response to SARS-CoV-2. Particularly, differentiating between healthy and infected human alveolar type II (hAT2) cells with SARS-CoV-2. Hence, we explore the feasibility of deep transfer learning (DTL) and introduce a highly accurate approach that works as follows: First, we downloaded and processed 286 images pertaining to healthy and infected hAT2 cells obtained from the electron microscopy public image archive. Second, we provided processed images to two DTL computations to induce ten DTL models. The first DTL computation employs five pre-trained models (including DenseNet201 and ResNet152V2) trained on more than one million images from the ImageNet database to extract features from hAT2 images. Then, it flattens and provides the output feature vectors to a trained, densely connected classifier with the Adam optimizer. The second DTL computation works in a similar manner, with a minor difference in that we freeze the first layers for feature extraction in pre-trained models while unfreezing and jointly training the next layers. The results using five-fold cross-validation demonstrated that TFeDenseNet201 is 12.37× faster and superior, yielding the highest average ACC of 0.993 ( F 1 of 0.992 and MCC of 0.986) with statistical significance ( P < 2.2 × 10 − 16 from a t -test) compared to an average ACC of 0.937 ( F 1 of 0.938 and MCC of 0.877) for the counterpart (TFtDenseNet201), showing no significance results ( P = 0.093 from a t -test).