Enhancing the medical diagnosis of COVID-19 with learning based decision support systems

Abstract

Since late December 2019, the COVID-19 pandemic has had substantial impact and long-lasting impact on numerous lives. The surge in patients has overwhelmed hospitals and exhausted essential resources such as masks and gloves. However, in response to this crisis, we have developed a robust solution that can ease the burden on emergency services and manage the influx of patients. Our proposed framework comprises deep learning and machine learning models that can predict and manage patient demand with high accuracy. The first model, is specifically designed to classify computed tomography (CT) scan images for COVID or non-COVID cases. We trained multiple convolutional neural network (CNN) models on a large dataset of CT scan images and evaluated their performance on a separate test set. Our evaluation showed that the ResNet50 model was the most effective, achieving an accuracy of 93.28%. The second model uses patient measurements dataset to predict the likelihood of intensive care unit (ICU) admission for COVID-19 patients. We experimented with the XGBoost machine learning algorithm and found that the accuracy score achieved 88.40%.