COVID-19 has spread worldwide and the World Health Organization was forced to list it as a Public Health Emergency of International Concern. The disease has severely impacted most of the people because it affects the lung and causes severe breathing problems and lung infections. Differentiating other lung ailments from COVID-19 infection and determining the severity is a challenging process. Doctors can give vital life-saving services and support patients' lives only if the severity of their condition is determined. This work proposed a two-step approach for detecting the COVID-19 infection from the lung CT images and determining the severity of the patient's illness. To extract the features, pre-trained models are used, and by analyzing them, integrated the features from AlexNet, DenseNet-201, and ResNet-50. The COVID-19 detection is carried out by using an Artificial Neural Network(ANN) model. After the COVID-19 infection has been identified, severity detection is performed. For that, image features are combined with the clinical data and is classified as High, Moderate, Low with the help of Cubic Support Vector Machine(SVM). By considering three severity levels, patients with high risk can be given more attention. The method was tested on a publicly available dataset and obtained an accuracy of 92.0%, sensitivity of 96.0%, and an F1-Score of 91.44% for COVID-19 detection and got overall accuracy of 90.0% for COVID-19 severity detection for three classes.
Keywords: AlexNet; Computed tomography; DenseNet-201; Neural network; ResNet-50; Transfer learning.
© The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature 2022.