Cycle generative adversarial network approaches to produce novel portable chest X-rays images for covid-19 diagnosis

Abstract

[Abstract]: Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19), declared a global pandemic by the World Health Organization, mainly affects the pulmonary tissues, playing chest X-ray images an important role for its screening and early detection. In this context, portable X-ray devices are widely used, representing an alternative to fixed devices in order to reduce risks of cross-contamination. However, they provide lower quality and detailed images in terms of spatial resolution and contrast. In this work, given the low availability of images of this recent disease, we present new approaches to artificially increase the dimensionality of portable chest X-ray datasets for COVID-19 diagnosis. Hence, we combined 3 complementary CycleGAN architectures to perform a simultaneous oversampling using an unsupervised strategy and without the necessity of paired data. Despite the poor quality of the portable X-ray images, we provide an overall accuracy of 92.50% in a COVID-19 screening context, proving their suitability for COVID-19 diagnostic tasks.