Multimedia data plays an important role in medicine and healthcare since EHR (Electronic Health Records) entail complex images and videos for analyzing patient data. In this article, we hypothesize that transfer learning with computer vision can be adequately harnessed on such data, more specifically chest X-rays, to learn from a few images for assisting accurate, efficient recognition of COVID. While researchers have analyzed medical data (including COVID data) using computer vision models, the main contributions of our study entail the following. Firstly, we conduct transfer learning using a few images from publicly available big data on chest X-rays, suitably adapting computer vision models with data augmentation. Secondly, we aim to find the best fit models to solve this problem, adjusting the number of samples for training and validation to obtain the minimum number of samples with maximum accuracy. Thirdly, our results indicate that combining chest radiography with transfer learning has the potential to improve the accuracy and timeliness of radiological interpretations of COVID in a cost-effective manner. Finally, we outline applications of this work during COVID and its recovery phases with future issues for research and development. This research exemplifies the use of multimedia technology and machine learning in healthcare.
Keywords: AI in medicine; Big data mining; Computer vision; Electronic health records; Image recognition; Transfer learning.
© The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2023, Springer Nature or its licensor (e.g. a society or other partner) holds exclusive rights to this article under a publishing agreement with the author(s) or other rightsholder(s); author self-archiving of the accepted manuscript version of this article is solely governed by the terms of such publishing agreement and applicable law.