Screening of COVID-19 Patients Using Deep Learning and IoT Framework

In March 2020, the World Health Organization declared the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) outbreak as a pandemic due to its uncontrolled global spread. Reverse transcription polymerase chain reaction is a laboratory test that is widely used for the diagnosis of this deadly disease. However, the limited availability of testing kits and qualified staff and the drastically increasing number of cases have hampered massive testing. To handle COVID-19 testing problems, we apply the Internet of Things and artificial intelligence to achieve self-adaptive, secure, and fast resource allocation, real-time tracking, remote screening, and patient monitoring. In addition, we implement a cloud platform for efficient spectrum utilization. Thus, we propose a cloud-based intelligent system for remote COVID-19 screening using cognitive-radio-based Internet of Things and deep learning. Specifically, a deep learning technique recognizes radiographic patterns in chest computed tomography (CT) scans. To this end, contrast-limited adaptive histogram equalization is applied to an input CT scan followed by bilateral filtering to enhance the spatial quality. The image quality assessment of the CT scan is performed using the blind/referenceless image spatial quality evaluator. Then, a deep transfer learning model, VGG-16, is trained to diagnose a suspected CT scan as either COVID-19 positive or negative. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed VGG-16 model outperforms existing COVID-19 screening models regarding accuracy, sensitivity, and specificity. The results obtained from the proposed system can be verified by doctors and sent to remote places through the Internet.