COVID-19 Severity based on Deep Convolutional Neural Networks Chest X-Ray Image in Aceh, Indonesia

Introduction: Every area of our lives has been devastated by the worldwide Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) epidemic. However, the development of artificial intelligence has made it possible to build advanced applications that can fulfill this level of clinical accuracy. This study aimed to create a deep learning model that can detect COVID-19 from a chest image dataset of confirmed patients treated at the provincial hospital in Aceh. Methods: Eight hundred confirmed COVID-19 patients' chest X-ray photos were gathered locally from Dr. Zainoel Abidin General Hospital, Banda Aceh. Performance was evaluated in several ways. First, the dataset was used for training and testing. Second, the data was used to train and test the model. VGG16 is a robust network adapted to an enhanced dataset constructed from a confirmed COVID-19 chest X-ray pool. To artificially produce a huge number of chest X-ray pictures, this study used data augmentation techniques such as random rotation at an angle between 10 and 10°, random noise, and horizontal flips. Results: The experimental results were encouraging: the proposed models classified chest X-ray pictures as normal or COVID-19 with an accuracy of 97.20% for Resnet50, 98.10% for InceptionV3, and 98.30% for VGG16. The results showed the outstanding performance of straightforward COVID-19 diagnosis with the classification of COVID-19 severity, such as mild, severe, and very severe. Conclusion: These made it possible to automate the X-ray image interpretation process accurately and could also be applied when materials and reverse transcription polymerase chain reaction  (RT-PCR) tests are scarce.