Detection of Omicron Caused Pneumonia from Radiology Images Using Convolution Neural Network (CNN)

COVID-19 disease caused by the SARS-CoV-2 virus has created social and economic disruption across the world. The ability of the COVID-19 virus to quickly mutate and transfer has created serious concerns across the world. It is essential to detect COVID-19 infection caused by different variants to take preventive measures accordingly. The existing method of detection of infections caused by COVID-19 and its variants is costly and time-consuming. The impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic in developing countries are very drastic due to the unavailability of medical facilities and infrastructure to handle the pandemic. Pneumonia is the major symptom of COVID-19 infection. The radiology of the lungs in varies in the case of bacterial pneumonia as compared to COVID-19-caused pneumonia. The pattern of pneumonia in lungs in radiology images can also be used to identify the cause associated with pneumonia. In this paper, we propose the methodology of identifying the cause (either due to COVID-19 or other types of infections) of pneumonia from radiology images. Furthermore, because different variants of COVID-19 lead to different patterns of pneumonia, the proposed methodology identifies pneumonia, the COVID-19 caused pneumonia, and Omicron caused pneumonia from the radiology images. To fulfill the above-mentioned tasks, we have used three Convolution Neural Networks (CNNs) at each stage of the proposed methodology. The results unveil that the proposed step-by-step solution enhances the accuracy of pneumonia detection along with finding its cause, despite having a limited dataset.