Transfer Learning Approach to Classify the X-Ray Image that Corresponds to Corona Disease Using ResNet50 Pre-Trained by ChexNet

The COVID-19 pandemic has had a widespread negative impact globally. It shares symptoms with other respiratory illnesses such as pneumonia and influenza, making rapid and accurate diagnosis essential to treat individuals and halt further transmission. X-ray imaging of the lungs is one of the most reliable diagnostic tools. Utilizing deep learning, we can train models to recognize the signs of infection, thus aiding in the identification of COVID-19 cases. For our project, we developed a deep learning model utilizing the ResNet50 architecture, pre-trained with ImageNet and CheXNet datasets. We tackled the challenge of an imbalanced dataset, the CoronaHack Chest X-Ray dataset provided by Kaggle, through both binary and multi-class classification approaches. Additionally, we evaluated the performance impact of using Focal loss versus Cross-entropy loss in our model.