Annals of Operations Research

https://doi.org/10.1007/s10479-022-05151-y

ORIGINAL RESEARCH

A novel deep neural network model based Xception

and genetic algorithm for detection of COVID-19 from X-ray
images

Burak Gülmez1

Accepted: 14 December 2022

© The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2022

Abstract
The coronavirus first appeared in China in 2019, and the World Health Organization (WHO)
named it COVID-19. Then WHO announced this illness as a worldwide pandemic in March
2020. The number of cases, infections, and fatalities varied considerably worldwide. Because
the main characteristic of COVID-19 is its rapid spread, doctors and specialists generally use
PCR tests to detect the COVID-19 virus. As an alternative to PCR, X-ray images can help
diagnose illness using artificial intelligence (AI). In medicine, AI is commonly employed.
Convolutional neural networks (CNN) and deep learning models make it simple to extract
information from images. Several options exist when creating a deep CNN. The possibil-
ities include network depth, layer count, layer type, and parameters. In this paper, a novel
Xception-based neural network is discovered using the genetic algorithm (GA). GA finds
better alternative networks and parameters during iterations. The best network discovered
with GA is tested on a COVID-19 X-ray image dataset. The results are compared with other
networks and the results of papers in the literature. The novel network of this paper gives more
successful results. The accuracy results are 0.996, 0.989, and 0.924 for two-class, three-class,
and four-class datasets, respectively.

Keywords COVID-19 · Xception · Deep learning · Genetic algorithm · Convolutional

neural network

1 Introduction

The coronavirus appeared in Wuhan, China, in December 2019. This disease was declared an
emergency in January 2020 by WHO. Then it was named COVID-19 by WHO in February
2020. Also, it was announced as a worldwide pandemic in March 2020 (Kim, 2021; Zhu
et al., 2020). As the epidemic progressed, the number of cases, diseases, and deaths varied
worldwide. It deeply affected the United States of America, Italy, and Spain (Ceylan, 2021).
The most crucial feature of COVID-19 is that it spreads very quickly. The virus is easily

B Burak Gülmez
burakgulmez@erciyes.edu.tr
1 Department of Industrial Engineering, Erciyes University, Kayseri, Türkiye

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passed from one person to another. A COVID-19 patient may show symptoms such as cough,
fever, and flu after receiving the virus from another person. If this condition progresses, it
can lead to significant problems such as pneumonia, breathing difficulties, and even death.
Due to these problems, significant concerns have emerged in health systems in all countries,
including the world’s largest and most developed countries. Curfews have been declared in
many countries. In addition, meetings, schools, and work began to be done over the internet.
Citizens were advised by doctors to stay at home and not contact other citizens. Large-scale
bans came, such as the obligation to wear masks, inter-city transportation bans, and inter-
country transportation bans (Cheng et al., 2020; Coxon et al., 2020; Toğa et al., 2021). Also, it
affected job scheduling and timetabling. People changed their work routines (Arab Momeni
et al., 2022). It has become the most popular topic argued on the internet (Kumar et al., 2021).
Thus, it affected stock prices, clean energy, and green bonds (Chai et al., 2022).
One of the essential steps in the fight against COVID-19 is detecting sick people. PCR tests
are used for this. However, the probability of PCR tests giving accurate results is considered
low by doctors and experts. Moreover, these tests often make mistakes showing positive cases
as negative and negative cases as positive (Osman et al., 2020). Therefore, as an alternative to
PCR tests, patients’ radiology results and chest X-ray images can be used (Alhudhaif et al.,
2021; Qayyum et al., 2021).
Thanks to the advancement of computers, technology, and artificial intelligence tech-
niques, disease detection can be made from x-ray pictures. Artificial intelligence is widely
used in medicine. Thanks to the development of CNN and deep learning models, it is effort-
less to extract information from images. In addition, high accuracy rates can be achieved.
However, classical machine learning techniques have problems with data in the form of
images. Thanks to CNN, this problem is eliminated (Gupta et al., 2021).
Many different alternatives can arise when designing deep neural networks. There are
many factors, such as the depth of the network, the number of neurons in the layers, the
types of layers, and the parameters. Therefore, there are an incalculable number of alter-
natives. Usually, researchers try to find the right mesh based on their experience and trial
and error method. In addition, very good choices can be made among these alternatives with
metaheuristic algorithms (Gülmez & Kulluk, 2019; Özmen et al., 2018).
In this study, a deep CNN network is used for COVID-19 detection. Furthermore, GA,
a metaheuristic algorithm, is used to find this Xception-based deep artificial neural network
(ANN). In this way, the accuracy rate of the deep network is higher than other compared
models.

2 Related works

There are various applications of deep learning as brain tumor segmentation (Ranjbarzadeh
et al., 2021a, 2021b), reducing energy consumption (Khodaverdian et al., 2021), deep belief
networks with transfer learning (Wang et al., 2019), lung infection segmentation (Ran-
jbarzadeh et al., 2021a, 2021b), diagnosis of heart failure (Hariri et al., 2022), financial
distress prediction (Elhoseny et al., 2022), tumor location (Jafarzadeh Ghoushchi et al.,
2021), sports activity prediction (Zeng et al., 2021), energy-aware resource allocation (Kho-
daverdian et al., 2021), and fuzzy deep neural network systems (Wang et al., 2020a, 2020b;
Wang & Qiao, 2021).
Also, there are lots of research related to deep learning and COVID-19. Some of them are
listed below.

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Luz et al. (2022) created EfficientNet as a deep ANN. They used a hierarchical classifier
to take advantage of the problem’s taxonomy. An X-ray dataset was utilized for training the
suggested techniques and the other five competing architectures. With fewer parameters than
the other designs, the suggested technique was shown to build a high-quality model with
high accuracy. Before asserting that deep learning may aid doctors in the job of identifying
COVID-19 in X-ray pictures can be validated.
Haghanifar et al. (2022) collected various chest x-ray pictures from several sources and
created one of the biggest publicly available collections. They used the well-known CheXNet
model to create COVID-CXNet by using the transfer learning paradigm. This robust approach
was able to identify and precisely localize the new coronavirus pneumonia based on relevant
and meaningful variables. COVID-CXNet was a step in the direction of a fully automated
and dependable COVID-19 detection system.
Bhattacharyya et al. (2022) offered a novel approach to identifying COVID-19 and pneu-
monia. The suggested approach could be broken down into three steps. The raw X-ray
images were segmented in the first phase using a conditional generative adversarial network
(C-GAN) to produce lung images. In the second phase, the segmented lung pictures were
fed into a unique pipeline that combines key point extraction techniques and trained DNN
for the extraction of discriminating characteristics. In the last stage, several ML models were
used to categorize COVID-19, pneumonia, and normal lung images. The classification per-
formance of the various suggested architectures that combine DNNs, key point extraction
techniques, and ML models was compared. Using the VGG-19 model in conjunction with
the binary robust invariant scalable key-points (BRISK) technique, they obtained the best
classification accuracy, and the suggested approach may be used effectively for COVID-19
patient screening.
Jain et al. (2020) identified the presence of COVID-19 in both individuals with and without
the disease using chest x-rays. They employed deep learning-based CNN models to compare
their performance after cleaning up the photos and adding more data. Using these models,
they have been able to compare and contrast their accuracy. Their Results analysis showed
that the Xception model is more accurate in identifying Chest X-ray pictures than other
models.
Basu et al. (2020) introduced domain extension transfer learning (DETL). DETL, with a
pre-trained deep CNN, was used to classify a huge chest X-Ray dataset into four categories:
normal, pneumonia, other diseases, and COVID-19. The use of chest X-rays for COVID-19
diagnosis was assessed by doing a fivefold cross-validation. Reproducibility is possible on
larger and more diversified datasets, as the early findings suggest. They got successful results
of accuracy.
Nayak et al. (2021) presented a DL-aided automated technique for early detection of
COVID-19 infection using X-ray images. Using eight pre-trained CNN models for the clas-
sification of COVID-19 from normal instances, they found that the models were successful.
As a result of these comparisons, the best-fitting model has been determined by considering
many essential aspects such as learning rate, batch size, number of epochs, and the optimizer
used. The models were tested using publicly accessible chest X-ray pictures, and the best
performance was achieved by ResNet-34.
Ismael and Şengür (2021) classified COVID-19 and healthy chest X-ray images using
deep learning methods, such as deep feature extraction and fine-tuning of pre-trained CNN,
which has been achieved using these approaches. Several pre-trained deep CNN models were
employed for the extraction of deep features, including ResNet18 and VGG16. The Support
Vector Machines (SVM) classifier was used to classify the deep features using several kernel
functions. For the fine-tuning process, the previously trained deep CNN models were also

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utilized. Their paper proposed an end-to-end training CNN paradigm. The research employed
classification accuracy as a performance metric. According to experimental results, deep
learning can identify COVID-19 in chest X-ray pictures. ResNet50 model and SVM classifier
with the linear kernel function gave the highest accuracy among the findings collected.
Jain et al. (2021) used data augmentation methods to increase the dataset length. To
distinguish COVID-19-generated pneumonia from healthy cases, bacterial and other virus-
induced pneumonia on X-ray pictures of the chest, a deep network implementation in two
phases was created. Both training, validation, testing, and fivefold cross-validation techniques
have been used to illustrate the efficacy of the suggested strategy. For COVID-19 detection,
the suggested techniques had high classification accuracy, recall, and precision values.
Civit-Masot et al. (2020) showed that by utilizing torso radiographs, a VGG16-based
Deep Learning model was good at detecting pneumonia and COVID-19. Results revealed
a high degree of specificity and a high degree of sensitivity in the detection of COVID-19,
indicating that the test may be utilized as a screening tool. In addition, all classes analyzed
had AUCs on ROC curves well.
Goel et al. (2022) studied COVID-19 with the multi-objective version of the Grasshopper
Optimization Algorithm and named it Multi-COVID-Net. A two-step deep network archi-
tecture was determined to classify X-ray images. The results of the new algorithm were
successful.
Karakanis and Leontidis (2021) provided a novel method for finding COVID-19 that
relies on a conditional generative adversarial network. They provided two lightweight deep-
learning models. Both binary and multi-classification methods were utilized in their trials,
which included bacterial pneumonia as a third class. A ResNet8 model as well as other
research, have shown their models to be competitive. In addition, their models’ identification
of COVID-19 from posteroanterior chest X-ray images was more robust and trustworthy than
that of a baseline ResNet8, thanks to the use of a testing procedure suggested in the literature.
Ouchicha et al. (2020) constructed CVDNet, which is a deep CNN model. It has been
proposed to distinguish COVID-19 infection from other types of pneumonia using chest X-
ray images. Based on the residual neural network, two parallel layers with varying kernel
sizes were used to capture the inputs’ local and global properties in the proposed architecture.
They used a small dataset and expected to get better outcomes with additional training data.
They claimed that radiologists might benefit from using the CVDNet model to diagnose and
early identification of instances of COVID-19.
Duran-Lopez et al. (2020) represented a deep learning-based method named COVID-
XNet, for COVID-19 detection in chest X-ray pictures. In order to extract key characteristics
and classify COVID-19 and normal instances, the proposed system applies a series of pre-
processing techniques to the input pictures to reduce variability and boost contrast. As a
result, good accuracy values were achieved utilizing a fivefold cross-validation strategy.
They claimed that COVID-XNet’s findings suggest that it might be employed by radiologists
and help in the battle against COVID-19.
Khan et al. (2020) created CoroNet as a deep CNN model that proposes to use for the
automated detection of COVID-19 infection in chest X-ray images. Pre-trained on ImageNet,
the Xception architecture underpins the proposed model, which has been trained from the
ground up using photos of pneumonia in the chest taken from two separate publicly accessible
datasets. Tests on the supplied dataset demonstrate that their suggested model had successful
accuracy for COVID-19 for four-class classification, three-class classification, and two-class
classification problems.
Ozcan (2021) used single layer-based (SLB) and feature fusion-based (FFB) approaches
to detect COVID-19. Six different FFB and four different SLB models were created. One

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of the FFB models exceeded studies in the literature. Therefore, FFB and SLB models were
very effective for the COVID dataset.
In this paper, Xception and GA-based, a new CNN architecture is created. The new
architecture is compared with other studies in the literature. This paper is the first and only
work with Xception, GA, and COVID-19 detection. This method overcomes the other works
from the literature.

3 Algorithms

In this paper, to detect COVID-19 from X-ray images, a deep neural network is used. The
network is a version of the Xception model that is a CNN model. The main aim is to find
the best architecture for it. To find the best architecture, GA is used. GA is a metaheuristic
algorithm. In this section, CNN and GA are explained.

3.1 CNN

CNN is one of the most effective approaches for pattern recognition. In general, a deep CNN
is a structure comprised of convolutional layers, pooling layers, and a fully linked layer.
Locally trained filters are utilized to extract visual information from the input picture in these
structures. The pooling step reduces the size of the feature maps, which are then used as the
input pictures for the following convolution. This technique is repeated until all deep features
have been retrieved. Following these processes, a classifier often makes a determination
based on these attributes. Convolutional procedures are utilized to extract features in this
structure, while a fully connected network serves as a classifier for these characteristics.
For categorization purposes, the fully connected component may end up with a SoftMax
output layer. Numerous prominent network architectures have been constructed using these
layers, including AlexNet, Xception, and GoogLeNet. One of the most significant issues
is overfitting these structures during training. Several approaches for avoiding overfitting
have been developed, including data augmentation and dropout layer (Sarıgül et al., 2019).
Figure 1 shows a sample CNN.

3.1.1 Convolutional layer

It is possible to apply complicated functions to the input picture by using a convolution layer,
which is a structure containing a number of fixed-size filters. Locally trained filters are used
to do this procedure. As a result of this operation, the filter weights and biases are uniforms

Fig. 1 Convolutional neural network sample (Cho & Kim, 2021)

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Fig. 2 Convolutional layer sample (Lakhmiri et al., 2021)

across the picture. This mechanism is known as the weight-sharing mechanism, and it allows
the same feature to be represented across the entire image. A neuron’s local receptive field
is the region to which the neuron is previously linked. The size of the filters determines the
size of the receptive field. Let the input image’s size and the kernel’s size be, the image’s
representation, and the filter’s weight and bias be and, respectively. ReLu or sigmoid may
be used as an activation function to compute output (Sarıgül et al., 2019). Figure 2 shows a
sample convolutional layer.

3.1.2 Pooling layer

Convolution and activation functions are applied to feature maps before the pooling process.
Summaries of the input features appear in the smaller feature maps that result from this
process. Then, it slides a window over the image to apply the operation chosen. The maximum,
average, and L2 pooling procedures are the most common pooling operations. Averaging the
input values yields an average pooling result, whereas maximizing the pooling result yields a
maximum pooling result. Reduced picture size and independent visual element extraction are
pooling operations’ primary benefits (Sarıgül et al., 2019). Max pooling and average pooling
samples can be seen in Fig. 3.

3.1.3 Fully connected layer

The data is reduced to a one-dimensional vector once it has been convoluted and pooled. The
fully linked network will take this vector as its input. One or more levels may be concealed
inside the completely interconnected system. Each neuron adds a bias value to the connection
weights and multiplies them by the data from the preceding layer. The determined value is
sent via the activation function before being communicated to the next layer. Then finally,
the class is determined (Sarıgül et al., 2019).

3.1.4 Xception model

The Xception model (Chollet, 2017) was proposed as a CNN architecture in 2017. It was
introduced as "extreme inception." Xception has 36 convolutions layers. It consists of three

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Fig. 3 Pooling layer sample (Yani, 2019)

flows. The first flow is the entry flow which has convolution, separable convolution, and
pooling layers. The second flow is the middle flow which has separable convolution layers.
And the middle flow repeats 8 times. The third flow is the exit flow. It is the last flow and
gives the result with the dense layer. The Xception model can be seen in Fig. 4. The selection
of the Xception algorithm is that the Xception algorithm is very effective and has given very
good results in previous research (Chen et al., 2021, 2022; Shaheed et al., 2022). So, it is
used for the COVID-19 detection problem.

3.2 Genetic algorithm (GA)

GA is a metaheuristic optimization algorithm. As a general principle, solutions can be thought

of as genes, and good solutions are passed on to the next generations. Bad solutions cannot be
passed on to the next generations. It works on the principle that good solutions survive. In GA,
the search space consists of individuals that are solutions. Solutions are expressed as chro-
mosomes, and each chromosome is in the form of an array or matrix. The objective function
measures the quality of each individual. If the goal is minimization, low-value individuals
are more important. High-value solutions are more important if the goal is maximization.
First, the initial population is created. Solutions in this initial population take random values.
Then each solution is evaluated according to the objective function, and a value is assigned to
each. The individuals with the best value are selected, and new solutions are generated with
cross-over. Then, new individuals are created by mutation. Ultimately, the good solutions in
all these individuals are passed on to the next generation with high probability. Bad solutions
are eliminated with low probability. This process continues until the stopping criterion is met
(Gülmez, 2023). GA flowchart is seen in Fig. 5.

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Fig. 4 Standard Xception architecture

Fig. 5 Genetic algorithm

flowchart (Albadr et al., 2020)

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Table 1 Genetic algorithm terms

Population Chromosome 1 1 (Gene) 8 2 9 7 3 4 6 5

Chromosome 2 8 7 6 1 5 2 4 3 9

The genetic algorithm can be divided into five stages:

• Initial population
• Objective function
• Selection
• Cross-over
• Mutation

3.2.1 Initial population

The algorithm begins with a group of individuals called a population. Each individual is a
solution to the problem. The population consists of chromosomes. Chromosomes make up
genes. Genes are combined into a string to form a chromosome. In the example in Table
1, there are 2 chromosomes, each of which has a total of 9 genes, that is, the solution. The
population size is 2. The starting population is a population of randomly generated genes and
chromosomes.
The objective function determines how valuable or goal-oriented an individual (chromo-
some) is. It is also an individual’s ability to compete with other individuals. Each individual
is given an objective function score. The probability that an individual will be selected for
reproduction depends on this objective function value.

3.2.2 Selection

In the selection stage, the most suitable individuals are tried to be selected and tried to be
transferred to the next generations. In addition, parent selection is required for the cross-over
stage. Then, they will also be selected. The roulette wheel method, which selects according to
the values of the objective functions, is preferred for the selection. This method is a frequently
used selection method and gives good results. An example selection related to this method is
given in Table 2. The chance of being selected here is valid for maximization problems. The
objective function should be arranged inversely with its value for minimization problems.

Table 2 Selection probabilities of chromosomes with the roulette wheel method

Chromosomes Objective function value (maximization) Selection probability

Chromosome 1 100 0.20

Chromosome 2 200 0.40
Chromosome 3 150 0.30
Chromosome 4 50 0.10
Total 500 1.00

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Table 3 One-point cross-over. Parent chromosomes

(Color figure online)
Chromosome 1 1 2 3 4 5
Chromosome 2 3 5 1 2 4
Children chromosomes
Chromosome 3 1 2 3 2 4
Chromosome 4 3 5 1 4 5

Table 4 Double-point cross-over. Parent chromosomes

(Color figure online)
Chromosome 1 1 2 3 4 5
Chromosome 2 3 5 1 2 4
Children chromosomes
Chromosome 3 1 5 1 4 5
Chromosome 4 3 2 3 2 4

3.2.3 Cross-over

Cross-over is the most important part of the genetic algorithm. Here good solutions go to gene
exchange among themselves. In this way, new solutions are obtained. Since the new solutions
obtained are obtained from good solutions, the quality of the solutions is also preserved.
Two different variations can be tried in the cross-over. The first is the single-point
cross-over, and the second is the double-point cross-over. In a one-point cross-over, the
chromosomes of two separate individuals are randomly split in half at a point, and the pieces
are exchanged between individuals. Thus, two new individuals are formed. One-point cross-
over operation can be seen in Table 3. The cross-over was performed from the red-colored
and thick-lined point. Two new individuals emerged after crossing over.
In the double-point cross-over, the chromosomes of individuals are marked at two different
points and divided into three parts. The middle pieces are exchanged between individuals,
and two new individuals are formed. An example of a double-point cross-over can be seen in
Table 4. Two points are determined for individuals with two parents. These points are marked
in red and bold. Chromosomes are divided into three at these marked locations. Again, the
middle pieces are exchanged, and two new individuals are obtained.

3.2.4 Mutation

The mutation increases the diversity of solutions. If the solutions are constantly starting to
resemble each other, they come out of the narrow field and become different with mutation.
However, if the mutation is too much, the solutions’ improvement rate decreases. Therefore,
the mutation is necessary but should be kept at a low rate.
The mutation is the random change of genes in a chromosome. A randomly selected gene
in the chromosomes changes. Thus, a new solution is obtained. As can be seen in Table 5,

Table 5 Mutation. (Color figure Before mutaon

online)
Chromosome 1 1 2 3 4 5
Aer mutaon
Chromosome 1 1 4 3 2 5

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a gene in red is selected, and a random number replaces the gen. Thus, a new solution is
obtained.
After all these stages, the next iteration (generation) is passed. These processes continue
until the stopping criterion is met.

3.3 Model

In this study, GA is used for the Xception architecture, which is a deep CNN network. First,
a deep Xception network is created with the values from the GA algorithm. These deep
networks are then trained and tested with the dataset used to understand whether people have
COVID-19. An error rate is determined for each network. This solution with a low error
rate is a valuable solution. Then, these evaluated solutions are processed through the GA
algorithm throughout the iterations. With each iteration, new networks are created, and more
and more successful results are obtained. The flowchart of the algorithm is in Fig. 6. The
reason for selecting the Xception model is that it is a very effective algorithm that produced
excellent results in prior studies. The reason for this model is that it is aimed at finding the
best architecture to detect COVID-19. With this approach, a new network is found for the
problem. For every different problem, different network architectures can be successful.

4 Results

4.1 COVID-19 X-ray dataset

In this study, the dataset used by Khan et al. (2020) is used.1 By collecting through public
image databases, they built a collection of chest X-ray pictures from GitHub repositories and
Kaggle. They used the dataset in their study. There are four different classes in the dataset.
They are COVID-19, normal, pneumonia bacterial, and pneumonia viral. In Fig. 7, example
images of these four classes can be seen.
The dataset contains 1251 images. 974 images are used to train, and 277 images are used
to test. In the test data, there are 73 normal, 74 pneumonia bacterial, 70 pneumonia viral, and
60 COVID-19 images. The distribution of the images is seen in Table 6.

4.2 Evaluation metrics

Evaluation metrics that are used in this paper are accuracy, precision, recall, and F1 score.
The metrics are used very commonly for classification problems. Also, for the GA algorithm,
the error rate that is a misclassed ratio is used. The accuracy, precision, recall, F1 score, and
error rate formulas can be seen in Eqs. (1), (2), (3), (4), and (5), respectively (Gülmez 2022).
tr ue positive + tr ue negative
accuracy = (1)
tr ue positive + tr ue negative + f alse positive + f alse negative
tr ue positive
pr ecision = (2)
tr ue positive + f alse positive
tr ue positive
r ecall = (3)
tr ue positive + f alse negative

1 https://github.com/drkhan107/CoroNet.

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Fig. 6 Flowchart of the algorithm to find the best architecture

2 ∗ r ecall ∗ pr ecision
F1 scor e = (4)
r ecall + pr ecision
err or rate = 1−accuracy (5)

4.3 Results

The alternatives are prepared to create Xception architecture. These are the number of filters,
the shape of filters, the training algorithm, the learning rate of the training algorithm, the size

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Fig. 7 Example images from different classes (Khan et al., 2020)

Table 6 The dataset

Class Train Test Total

Normal 237 73 310

Pneumonia bacterial 256 74 330
Pneumonia viral 257 70 327
COVID-19 224 60 284
Total 974 277 1251

of the dense layer, and the dropout rate of the dropout layer. The alternatives can be seen in
Table 7. GA tries to find the best architecture for the neural network.
The loss function of the network is multi-class cross entropy. The formula of the loss
function is in Eq. (6).


K
Multiclass cr oss entr opy = − y k log ŷ k (6)
k

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Table 7 Alternatives of the

Xception-based neural network Hyperparameters Alternatives

Number of filters 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, 128, 256, 512, 1024

Shape of filters (1,1), (2,2), (3,3), (4,4), (6,6), (5,5), (7,7),
(8,8)
Shape of pooling (1,1), (2,2), (3,3), (4,4), (6,6), (5,5), (7,7),
(8,8)
Training algorithm Adagrad, Adam, Adamax, RMSprop, SGD
Learning rate 0.01, 0.001, 0.0001, 0.00001, 0.000001
Size of the dense layer 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, 128, 256, 512, 1024
Dropout rate 0.3, 0.4, 0.5, 0.6, 0.7

The alternatives are tried by GA, and the aim is to find the best architecture. So, GA
worked with 20 population sizes and 20 iterations. By the iterations, the error rate decreases,
and accuracy increases, so solution quality increases. The benefit of GA as a metaheuristic
algorithm is to find successful results with limited runs. Without metaheuristic algorithms,
it is almost impossible to run all possible solutions because of the number of permutations
and time.
GA algorithm is worked and gives the result that can be seen in Fig. 8. At the first iteration,
the error rate is 0.097 (accuracy is 0.903). During iterations, the error rate decreases, and
accuracy increases. Finally, after 20 iterations, the accuracy value equals 0.924 (the error rate
is 0.076). Result of the 20 iterations, an architecture is found. The training process of the
architecture found by GA can be seen in Fig. 9. Also, the loss function can be seen in Fig. 10.

Fig. 8 Global best fitness value over 20 iterations

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Fig. 9 Accuracy over 80 epochs

Fig. 10 Loss value over 80 epochs

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Over the 80 iterations, the accuracy of the training data is 1. Also, precision, recall, and F1
score are 1. In the training data, the network predicts all samples correctly. For the test data,
the accuracy result of the best architecture is 0.924. Table 8 shows recall values for COVID-
19 and normal classes equal to 1. For the macro average of the four classes, precision, recall,
and F1 score values are 0.928, 0.926, and 0.926, respectively. For the weighted average of the
four classes, precision, recall, and F1 score values are 0.925, 0.924, and 0.923, respectively.
Figures 11 and 12 shows the confusion and confidence matrix of the four-class dataset.
For COVID-19 and normal classes, the predictions are very successful. But, for pneumonia
bacterial and pneumonia viral predictions are less successful than the other part. For the
pneumonia viral class, there are 14 wrong predictions.
The results of this study are compared with other studies in the literature that used the
same dataset. The comparison can be seen in Table 9. The result highlighted in bold in the
table is the best result. The new model succeeds in better accuracy. Other networks are more
complex because they have more parameters to train. It makes it hard to train better.

Table 8 Performance metric table of the model for the four-class dataset

Class Precision Recall F1 score Support

COVID 19 0.984 1.000 0.992 60

Normal 0.973 1.000 0.986 73
P. bacterial 0.838 0.905 0.870 74
P. viral 0.918 0.800 0.855 70
Accuracy 0.924 277
Macro average 0.928 0.926 0.926 277
Weighted average 0.925 0.924 0.923 277

Fig. 11 Confusion matrix of the four classed classification results

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Fig. 12 Confidence matrix of the four classed classification results

Table 9 Comparison of the models for the four-class dataset

Model Number of parameters Accuracy

COVID-Net (Wang et al., 2020a, 2020b) 116 million 0.835

CoroNet (Khan et al., 2020) 33 million 0.896
This study 2 million 0.924

Table 10 Wilcoxon test results

Networks p value

COVID-Net (Wang et al., 2020a, 2020b) < 0.001

CoroNet (Khan et al., 2020) < 0.001

To compare the works, One-Sample Wilcoxon Signed Rank Test is used in Table 10. The
results show that the p values are lower than 0.05, so this study is significant to other studies.

4.3.1 Three-class dataset

The three-class dataset is a version of the original dataset that converted pneumonia bacterial
and viral classes to pneumonia class. The result of the dataset is in Table 11. The accuracy
value is 0.989. The recall value of COVID-19 and normal classes are 1. The precision value
of pneumonia is also 1. For macro average values, precision, recall, and F1 scores are 0.986,
0.993, and 0.989, respectively. The weighted average of precision, recall, and F1 score values
are 0.989.

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Table 11 Performance metric table of the model for the three-class dataset

Class Precision Recall F1 score Support

COVID 19 0.984 1.000 0.992 60

Normal 0.973 1.000 0.986 73
Pneumonia 1.000 0.979 0.989 144
Accuracy 0.989 277
Macro average 0.986 0.993 0.989 277
Weighted average 0.989 0.989 0.989 277

Fig. 13 Confusion matrix of the three classed classification results

When Figs. 13 and 14 is examined, the results can be determined very successfully. Only
3 instances are classified wrong. All others are classified as true.
In Table 12, this study is compared with other studies in the literature. The result high-
lighted in bold in the table is the best result. It exceeds other algorithms with 0.989 accuracies.
Similar to the four-class dataset, a statistical analysis is made. It is seen in Table 13. All
p values are under 0.05, so the differences are significant.

4.3.2 Two-class dataset

The two-class dataset is prepared from the original dataset. The classes are determined into
two classes, and they are COVID-19 and not COVID-19. The results of the new dataset can
be seen in Table 14. Recall of COVID-19 and precision of not COVID-19 are 1. The accuracy
is 0.996 macro average of precision, recall, and F1 score values are 0.992, 0.998, and 0.995,
respectively. The weighted average of precision, recall, and F1 scores are 0.996.
According to the confusion matrix, only one instance is classified wrong. All other
instances are classified as true. It is in Figs. 15 and 16.

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Fig. 14 Confidence matrix of the three classed classification results

Table 12 Comparison of the models for the three-class dataset

Model Number of parameters Accuracy

VGG19 (Apostolopoulos & Mpesiana, 2020) 143 million 0.935

Xception (Apostolopoulos & Mpesiana, 2020) 33 million 0.929
Darknet (Ozturk et al., 2020) 1.1 million 0.870
Coronet (Khan et al., 2020) 33 million 0.896
This study 2 million 0.989

Table 13 Wilcoxon test results

Networks p value

VGG19 (Apostolopoulos & Mpesiana, 2020) < 0.001

Xception (Apostolopoulos & Mpesiana, 2020) < 0.001
Darknet (Ozturk et al., 2020) < 0.001
Coronet (Khan et al., 2020) < 0.001

Table 14 Performance metric table of the model for the three-class dataset

Class Precision Recall F1 score Support

COVID-19 0.984 1.000 0.992 60

Not COVID-19 1.000 0.995 0.998 217
Accuracy 0.996 277
Macro average 0.992 0.998 0.995 277
Weighted average 0.996 0.996 0.996 277

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Fig. 15 Confusion matrix of the two classed classification results

Fig. 16 Confidence matrix of the two classed classification results

When the results are compared with other studies in the literature, this model is the most
successful network with 0.996 accuracies. The other algorithm accuracies are between 0.856
and 0.990, as seen in Table 15. The result highlighted in bold in the table is the best result.
Also, a statistical test is made for the two-class dataset. The results can be seen in Table
16. Only CoroNet is not significantly different, with a 0.090 p value. Other networks are
significant statistically.
The proposed network consists of 74 layers and 2,076,068 parameters. The complexity
of the network can be seen in Table 17.

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Table 15 Comparison of the models for the two-class dataset

Model Number of parameters Accuracy

VGG19 (Apostolopoulos & Mpesiana, 2020) 143 million 0.988

Xception (Apostolopoulos & Mpesiana, 2020) 33 million 0.856
COVID-Net (Wang et al., 2020a, 2020b) 116 million 0.924
ResNet-50 (Sethy & Behera, 2020) 36 million 0.954
VGG19 (Hemdan et al., 2020) 143 million 0.900
ResNet-50 (Narin et al., 2021) 36 million 0.980
InceptionV3 (Narin et al., 2021) 26 million 0.970
DarkNet (Ozturk et al., 2020) 1.1 million 0.981
CoroNet (Khan et al., 2020) 33 million 0.990
This study 2 million 0.996

Table 16 Wilcoxon test results

Networks p value

VGG19 (Apostolopoulos & Mpesiana, 2020) 0.032

Xception (Apostolopoulos & Mpesiana, 2020) < 0.001
COVID-Net (Wang et al., 2020a, 2020b) < 0.001
ResNet-50 (Sethy & Behera, 2020) < 0.001
VGG19 (Hemdan et al., 2020) < 0.001
ResNet-50 (Narin et al., 2021) < 0.001
InceptionV3 (Narin et al., 2021) < 0.001
DarkNet (Ozturk et al., 2020) < 0.001
CoroNet (Khan et al., 2020) 0.090

Table 17 Complexity of the

network Proposed network

Number of layers 74
Number of parameters 2,076,068
Number of trainable parameters 2,059,620
Number of non-trainable parameters 16,448

The proposed method overcomes the other methods to find the best architecture of the
network. There can be lots of different network alternatives. If the network is simple, it can be
insufficient. If the network is complex and has lots of parameters, it can be very hard to train.
So, there must be an equilibrium in the network. GA finds the most effective network. The
optimal network architecture changes for every problem type. This paper uses the Xception
model and GA to find the best network architecture for COVID-19 x-ray images. This is the
reason the proposed method overcomes the other networks.

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5 Conclusion

The paper tries to find the best architecture of the Xception-based model to detect COVID-19.
For this, GA is used. X-ray pictures can be utilized to identify COVID-19 disease using AI.
The use of CNN and deep learning models simplified the process of extracting information
from images. Numerous alternatives are available for constructing a deep CNN. Various
choices are available, including network depth, layer count, layer type, and parameters. This
paper discovers a unique Xception-based neural network using GA. During iterations, GA
discovers superior alternative networks and parameters. The best network discovered using
GA is evaluated on a dataset of COVID-19 X-ray images. The findings are compared to those
of other networks and those of published studies. This paper’s novel network produces more
successful results. The accuracy values for two-class, three-class, and four-class datasets are
0.996, 0.989, and 0.924, respectively. The other algorithms from the previous studies gave
accuracy values of 0.896, 0.935, and 0.990, respectively. The results obtained from this paper
show that the Xception model is an effective model with architecture optimization by GA
because it finds the best architecture for this study.
For future studies about COVID-19, alternative models can be tried, like AlexNet,
GoogleNet, or different nets. Additionally, there are lots of metaheuristic algorithms in the
literature. Other metaheuristic algorithms can be tried to construct novel architectures. In
addition to them, different medical datasets like cancer and CT images can be trained.
Acknowledgements The author thanks TUBITAK (The Scientific and Technological Research Council of
Türkiye) for using TRUBA (High Performance and Grid Computing Center).

Data availability The data of this study is available at https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cmpb.2020.105581 (Khan

et al., 2020).

Declaration

Conflict of interest The author declares that he has no conflict of interest.

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