Framework for Classification of Chest X-Rays into Normal/COVID-19 Using Brownian-Mayfly-Algorithm Selected Hybrid Features

The improvements in computation facility and technology support the development and implementation of automatic methods for medical data assessment. This study tries to extend a framework for efficiently classifying chest radiographs (X-rays) into normal/COVID-19 class. The proposed framework consists subsequent phases: (i) image resizing, (ii) deep features extraction using a pretrained deep learning method (PDLM), (iii) handcrafted feature extraction, (iv) feature optimization with Brownian Mayfly-Algorithm (BMA), (v) serial integration of optimized features, and (vi) binary classification with 10-fold cross validation. In addition, this work implements two methodologies: (i) performance evaluation of the existing PDLM in the literature and (ii) improving the COVID-19 detection performance of chosen PDLM with this proposal. The experimental investigation of this study authenticates that the effort performed using pretrained VGG16 with SoftMax helped get a classification accuracy of >94%. Further, the research performed using the proposed framework with BMA selected features (VGG16 + handcrafted features) helps achieve a classification accuracy of 99.17% on the chosen X-ray image database. This outcome proves the scientific importance of the implemented framework, and in the future, this proposal can be adopted to inspect the clinically collected X-rays.