ET-NET: an ensemble of transfer learning models for prediction of COVID-19 infection through chest CT-scan images

The COVID-19 virus has caused a worldwide pandemic, affecting numerous individuals and accounting for more than a million deaths. The countries of the world had to declare complete lockdown when the coronavirus led to community spread. Although the real-time Polymerase Chain Reaction (RT-PCR) test is the gold-standard test for COVID-19 screening, it is not satisfactorily accurate and sensitive. On the other hand, Computer Tomography (CT) scan images are much more sensitive and can be suitable for COVID-19 detection. To this end, in this paper, we develop a fully automated method for fast COVID-19 screening by using chest CT-scan images employing Deep Learning techniques. For this supervised image classification problem, a bootstrap aggregating or Bagging ensemble of three transfer learning models, namely, Inception v3, ResNet34 and DenseNet201, has been used to boost the performance of the individual models. The proposed framework, called ET-NET, has been evaluated on a publicly available dataset, achieving 97.81 ± 0.53 % accuracy, 97.77 ± 0.58 % precision, 97.81 ± 0.52 % sensitivity and 97.77 ± 0.57 % specificity on 5-fold cross-validation outperforming the state-of-the-art method on the same dataset by 1.56%. The relevant codes for the proposed approach are accessible in: https://github.com/Rohit-Kundu/ET-NET_Covid-Detection.