A hybrid CNN–KNN approach for identification of COVID-19 with 5-fold cross validation

The novel coronavirus is the new member of the SARS family, which can cause mild to severe infection in the lungs and other vital organs like the heart, kidney and liver. For detecting COVID-19 from images, traditional ANN can be employed. This method begins by extracting the features and then feeding the features into a suitable classifier. The classification rate is not so high as feature extraction is dependent on the experimenters' expertise. To solve this drawback, a hybrid CNN-KNN-based model with 5-fold cross-validation is proposed to classify covid-19 or non-covid19 from CT scans of patients. At first, some pre-processing steps like contrast enhancement, median filtering, data augmentation, and image resizing are performed. Secondly, the entire dataset is divided into five equal sections or folds for training and testing. By doing 5-fold cross-validation, the generalization of the dataset is ensured and the overfitting of the network is prevented. The proposed CNN model consists of four convolutional layers, four max-pooling layers, and two fully connected layers combined with 23 layers. The CNN architecture is used as a feature extractor in this case. The features are taken from the CNN model's fourth convolutional layer and finally, the features are classified using K Nearest Neighbor rather than softmax for better accuracy. The proposed method is conducted over an augmented dataset of 4085 CT scan images. The average accuracy, precision, recall and F1 score of the proposed method after performing a 5-fold cross-validation is 98.26%, 99.42%,97.2% and 98.19%, respectively. The proposed method's accuracy is comparable with the existing works described further, where the state of the art and the custom CNN models were used. Hence, this proposed method can diagnose the COVID-19 patients with higher efficiency.