# Ensemble-CVDNet: A Deep Learning based End-to-End Classification Framework for COVID-19 Detection using Ensembles of Networks

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2012.09132 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.09132/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 9 Dec 2020.

## Built on by (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [The Prominence of Artificial Intelligence in COVID-19](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.09537/) (2021)
- [COVID-19 identification from volumetric chest CT scans using a progressively resized 3D-CNN incorporating segmentation, augmentation, and class-rebalancing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.06169/) (2021)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The new type of coronavirus disease (COVID-19), which started in Wuhan, China in December 2019, continues to spread rapidly affecting the whole world. It is essential to have a highly sensitive diagnostic screening tool to detect the disease as early as possible. Currently, chest CT imaging is preferred as the primary screening tool for evaluating the COVID-19 pneumonia by radiological imaging. However, CT imaging requires larger radiation doses, longer exposure time, higher cost, and may suffer from patient movements. X-Ray imaging is a fast, cheap, more patient-friendly and available in almost every healthcare facility. Therefore, we have focused on X-Ray images and developed an end-to-end deep learning model, i.e. Ensemble-CVDNet, to distinguish COVID-19 pneumonia from non-COVID pneumonia and healthy cases in this work. The proposed model is based on a combination of three lightweight pre-trained models SqueezeNet, ShuffleNet, and EfficientNet-B0 at different depths, and combines feature maps in different abstraction levels. In the proposed end to-end model, networks are used as feature extractors in parallel after fine-tuning, and some additional layers are used at the top of them. The proposed model is evaluated in the COVID-19 Radiography Database, a public data set consisting of 219 COVID-19, 1341 Healthy, and 1345 Viral Pneumonia chest X-Ray images. Experimental results show that our lightweight Ensemble-CVDNet model provides 98.30% accuracy, 97.78% sensitivity, and 97.61% F1 score using only 5.62M parameters. Moreover, it takes about 10ms to process and predict an X-Ray image using the proposed method using a mid level GPU. We believe that the method proposed in this study can be a helpful diagnostic screening tool for radiologists in the early diagnosis of the disease.
