Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) is caused by severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 virus (SARS-CoV-2). The virus transmits rapidly; it has a basic reproductive number R of 2.2-2.7. In March 2020, the World Health Organization declared the COVID-19 outbreak a pandemic. COVID-19 is currently affecting more than 200 countries with 6M active cases. An effective testing strategy for COVID-19 is crucial to controlling the outbreak but the demand for testing surpasses the availability of test kits that use Reverse Transcription Polymerase Chain Reaction (RT-PCR). In this paper, we present a technique to screen for COVID-19 using artificial intelligence. Our technique takes only seconds to screen for the presence of the virus in a patient. We collected a dataset of chest X-ray images and trained several popular deep convolution neural network-based models (VGG, MobileNet, Xception, DenseNet, InceptionResNet) to classify the chest X-rays. Unsatisfied with these models, we then designed and built a Residual Attention Network that was able to screen COVID-19 with a testing accuracy of 98% and a validation accuracy of 100%. A feature maps visual of our model show areas in a chest X-ray which are important for classification. Our work can help to increase the adaptation of AI-assisted applications in clinical practice. The code and dataset used in this project are available at https://github.com/vishalshar/covid-19-screening-using-RAN-on-X-ray-images.
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