DETECTION AND CLASSIFICATION OF COVID-19 CASES FROM OTHER CARDIOVASCULAR CLASSES FROM ELECTROCARDIOGRAPHY SIGNALS USING DEEP LEARNING AND ResNet NETWORK

Nowadays, the world confronts a highly infectious pandemic called coronavirus (COVID-19) and over 4 million people worldwide have now died from this illness. So, early detection of COVID-19 outbreak and distinguishing it from other diseases with the same physical symptoms can give enough time for treatment with true positive results and prevent coma or death. For early recognition of COVID-19, several methods for each modality are proposed. Although there are some modalities for COVID-19 detection, electrocardiography (ECG) is one of the fastest, the most accessible, the cheapest and the safest one. This paper proposed a new method for classifying COVID-19 patients from other cardiovascular disease by ECG signals. In the proposed method, ResNet50v2 which is a kind of convolutional neural network, is used for classification. In this paper because of image format of data, first data with image format are applied to the network and then for comparison, ECG images are changed to signal format and classification is done. These two strategies are used for COVID-19 classification from other cardiac abnormalities with different filter sizes and the results of strategies are compared with each other and other methods in this field. As it can be concluded from the results, signal-based data give better accuracy than image classification at best performance and it is better to change the image format to signals for classification. The second result can be found by comparing with other methods in this field, the proposed method of this paper gives better performance with high accuracy in COVID-19 classification.