Abstract
The Covid-19 virus outbreak that emerged in China at the end of 2019 caused a huge and devastating effect worldwide. In patients with severe symptoms of the disease, pneumonia develops due to Covid-19 virus. This causes intense involvement and damage in lungs. Although the emergence of the disease occurred a short time ago, many literature studies have been carried out in which these effects of the disease on the lungs were revealed by the help of lung CT imaging. In this study, the amount of 25 lung CT images in total (15 of Covid-19 patients and 10 of normal) was multiplied (250 images in total) using three data augmentation methods which relate to contrast change, brightness change and noise addition, and these images were subjected to automatic classification. Within the scope of the study, experiments were made for each case which include the use of the CT images of lungs (gray-level and RGB) directly, the images obtained by applying Local Binary Pattern (LBP) to these images (gray-level and RGB) and the images obtained by combining these images (gray-level and RGB). In the study, a 23-layer Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) architecture was developed and used in classification processes. Leave-one-group-out cross validation method was used to test the proposed system. In this context, the result of the study indicated that the best AUC and EER values were obtained for the combination of original (RGB) and LBP applied (RGB) images, and these figures are 0,9811 and 0,0445 respectively. It was observed that, applying LBP to images, the use of CNN input causes an increase in sensitivity values while it causes a decrease in values of specificity. The highest sensitivity was obtained for the case of using LBP-applied (RGB) images and has a value of 0,9947. Within the scope of the study, the highest values of specificity and accuracy were obtained by the help of CT of lungs (gray-level) with 0,9120 and 95,32%, respectively. The results of the study indicate that analyzing images of lung CT using deep learning methods in diagnosing Covid-19 disease will speed up the diagnosis and significantly reduce the burden on healthcare workers.