A pre-trained convolutional neural network with optimized capsule networks for chest X-rays COVID-19 diagnosis

Abstract

Coronavirus disease (COVID-19) is rapidly spreading worldwide. Recent studies show that radiological images contain accurate data for detecting the coronavirus. This paper proposes a pre-trained convolutional neural network (VGG16) with Capsule Neural Networks (CapsNet) to detect COVID-19 with unbalanced data sets. The CapsNet is proposed due to its ability to define features such as perspective, orientation, and size. Synthetic Minority Over-sampling Technique (SMOTE) was employed to ensure that new samples were generated close to the sample center, avoiding the production of outliers or changes in data distribution.