COVID-19 leads to radiological evidence of lower respiratory tract lesions, which support analysis to screen this disease using chest X-ray. In this scenario, deep learning techniques are applied to detect COVID-19 pneumonia in X-ray images, aiding a fast and precise diagnosis. Here, we investigate seven deep learning architectures associated with data augmentation and transfer learning techniques to detect different pneumonia types. We also propose an image resizing method with the maximum window function that preserves anatomical structures of the chest. The results are promising, reaching an accuracy of 99.8% considering COVID-19, normal, and viral and bacterial pneumonia classes. The differentiation between viral pneumonia and COVID-19 achieved an accuracy of 99.8%, and 99.9% of accuracy between COVID-19 and bacterial pneumonia. We also evaluated the impact of the proposed image resizing method on classification performance comparing with the bilinear interpolation; this pre-processing increased the classification rate regardless of the deep learning architectures used. We c ompared our results with ten related works in the state-of-the-art using eight sets of experiments, which showed that the proposed method outperformed them in most cases. Therefore, we demonstrate that deep learning models trained with pre-processed X-ray images could precisely assist the specialist in COVID-19 detection.
Keywords: COVID-19; Deep learning; Pre-processing; X-ray.
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