ETSVF-COVID19: efficient two-stage voting framework for COVID-19 detection

Abstract COVID-19 disease, an outbreak in the spring of 2020, reached very alarming dimensions for humankind due to many infected patients during the pandemic and the heavy workload of healthcare workers. Even though we have been saved from the darkness of COVID-19 after about three years, the importance of computer-aided automated systems that support field experts in the fight against with global threat has emerged once again. This study proposes a two-stage voting framework called ETSVF-COVID19 that includes transformer-based deep features and a machine learning approach for detecting COVID-19 disease. ETSVF-COVID19, which offers 99.2% and 98.56% accuracies on computed tomography scan and X-radiation images, respectively, could compete with the related works in the literature. The findings demonstrate that this framework could assist field experts in making informed decisions while diagnosing COVID-19 with its fast and accurate classification role. Moreover, ETSVF-COVID19 could screen for chest infections and help physicians, particularly in areas where test kits and specialist doctors are inadequate.