An Ensemble of CapsNet and KSVM Using Feature Fusion: Application to COVID-19 Detection

COVID-19 virus is a major worldwide pandemic that is growing at a fast pace throughout the world. The usual approach for diagnosing COVID-19 is the use of a real-time polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR) based nucleic acid test. However, RT-PCR has lower sensitivity in the early phases of COVID-19 detection. Recent studies have indicated that X-ray images may be useful throughout the early detection of the virus. Human screening has been shown to be cost-effective, susceptible to mistakes, and time-demanding, which has sparked an interest in using Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) to automate the process. CNNs, on the other hand, fail to view the exact placement of features as advantageous in medical imaging. Furthermore, for successful training and prediction, CNNs need a huge quantity of datasets. CNNs are rapidly reducing picture resolution, resulting in worsening accuracy in classification. We used newly created capsule networks (CapsNets) in our study to circumvent these disadvantages. The primary contribution is to improve the identification of SARS-CoV-2 with images obtained from X-ray by coupling capsule network with a kernel support vector machine (KSVM). The technique was evaluated using a publicly available dataset, and the proposed model shows that the accuracy of the CapsNet-KSVM based model is improved by 94.6% accuracy, 95% sensitivity, and 98% specificity, which outperforms the traditional CNN and other existing ensemble models. The proposed CapsNet-KSVM based system can be employed to identify the presence of COVID-19 in the human body using X-ray images.