A Novel Normalization Algorithm to Facilitate Pre-Assessment of Covid-19 Disease from Chest X-ray Image and its FPGA implementation

Abstract

COVID-19 is still a fatal disease, which has threatened all people by affecting the human lungs. Chest X-Ray or computed tomography (CT) imaging is commonly used to make a fast and reliable medical investigation to detect the COVID-19 virus from these medical images is remarkably challenging because it is a full-time job and prone to human errors. In this paper, a new normalization algorithm that consists of Mean-Variance-Softmax-Rescale (MVSR) processes respectively is proposed to provide facilitation pre-assessment and diagnosis Covid-19 disease. In order to show the effect of MVSR normalization technique on image processing, the algorithm is applied to chest X-ray images. Therefore, the normalized X-ray images with MVSR are used to recognize via one of the neural network models as known Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs). At the implementation stage, the MVSR algorithm is executed on MATLAB environment, then it is implemented on FPGA platform. All the arithmetic operations of the MVSR normalization are coded in VHDL with the help of fixed-point fractional number representation format. The experimental platform consists of Zynq-7000 Development Board and VGA monitor to display the both original X-ray and MVSR normalized image. The CNN model is constructed and executed using Anaconda Navigator interface with python language. Based on the results of this study, infections of Covid-19 disease can be easily diagnosed for MVSR normalized image. The proposed MVSR normalization makes the accuracy of CNN model increase from 83.01%, to 96.16% for binary class of chest X-ray images.