COVID-19 X-ray images classification based on enhanced fractional-order cuckoo search optimizer using heavy-tailed distributions

Classification of COVID-19 X-ray images to determine the patient's health condition is a critical issue these days since X-ray images provide more information about the patient's lung status. To determine the COVID-19 case from other normal and abnormal cases, this work proposes an alternative method that extracted the informative features from X-ray images, leveraging on a new feature selection method to determine the relevant features. As such, an enhanced cuckoo search optimization algorithm (CS) is proposed using fractional-order calculus (FO) and four different heavy-tailed distributions in place of the Levy flight to strengthen the algorithm performance during dealing with COVID-19 multi class classification optimization task. The classification process includes three classes, called normal patients, COVID-19 infected patients, and pneumonia patients. The distributions used are Mittag-Leffler distribution, Cauchy distribution, Pareto distribution, and Weibull distribution. The proposed FO-CS variants have been validated with eighteen UCI data-sets as the first series of experiments. For the second series of experiments, two data-sets for COVID-19 X-ray images are considered. The proposed approach results have been compared with well-regarded optimization algorithms. The outcomes assess the superiority of the proposed approach for providing accurate results for UCI and COVID-19 data-sets with remarkable improvements in the convergence curves, especially with applying Weibull distribution instead of Levy flight. (C) 2020 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Automated summary

This study proposes an alternative method for classifying COVID-19 X-ray images by extracting informative features and using a new feature selection method, leveraging an enhanced cuckoo search optimization algorithm and four different heavy-tailed distributions. Experimental results show that the method can provide accurate results for both UCI and COVID-19 datasets.