Abstract:

The new type of coronavirus disease (COVID-19), which has emerged in recent years, has become a serious disease that threatens health worldwide. COVID-19, which can be transmitted very quickly and with serious increases in death, has paved the way for many concerns. With the spread of the epidemic to a universal dimension, many studies have been carried out for the early diagnosis of this disease. With early diagnosis, both fatal cases are prevented and the planning of the epidemic can be easier. The fact that X-ışını images are much more advantageous than other imaging techniques in terms of time and applicability, and also that they are economical, has led to the focus of early diagnosis-based applications and methods on these images. Deep learning approaches have had a great impact in the diagnosis of COVID-19, as in the diagnosis of many diseases. In this study, we propose a diagnostic system based on the transformer method, which is the most up-to-date and much more popular architecture than previous techniques of deep learning such as CNN-based approaches. This method includes an approach based on vision transformer models and a more effective diagnosis of COVID-19 disease on a new dataset, the COVID-QU-Ex dataset. In experimental studies, it has been observed that vision transformer models are more successful than CNN models. In addition, the ViT-L16 model showed a much higher performance compared to similar studies in the literature, providing test accuracy and F1-score of over 96%.