Classification of COVID-19 in Chest CT Images using Convolutional Support Vector Machines
This work addresses the need for efficient diagnosis of COVID-19, but it is incremental as it combines existing deep learning and SVM techniques.
The study tackled the problem of automatic COVID-19 detection in chest CT images by proposing a Convolutional Support Vector Machine (CSVM) model, achieving a performance of 94.03% accuracy and other metrics like 96.09% sensitivity.
Purpose: Coronavirus 2019 (COVID-19), which emerged in Wuhan, China and affected the whole world, has cost the lives of thousands of people. Manual diagnosis is inefficient due to the rapid spread of this virus. For this reason, automatic COVID-19 detection studies are carried out with the support of artificial intelligence algorithms. Methods: In this study, a deep learning model that detects COVID-19 cases with high performance is presented. The proposed method is defined as Convolutional Support Vector Machine (CSVM) and can automatically classify Computed Tomography (CT) images. Unlike the pre-trained Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) trained with the transfer learning method, the CSVM model is trained as a scratch. To evaluate the performance of the CSVM method, the dataset is divided into two parts as training (%75) and testing (%25). The CSVM model consists of blocks containing three different numbers of SVM kernels. Results: When the performance of pre-trained CNN networks and CSVM models is assessed, CSVM (7x7, 3x3, 1x1) model shows the highest performance with 94.03% ACC, 96.09% SEN, 92.01% SPE, 92.19% PRE, 94.10% F1-Score, 88.15% MCC and 88.07% Kappa metric values. Conclusion: The proposed method is more effective than other methods. It has proven in experiments performed to be an inspiration for combating COVID and for future studies.