Differential Privacy Practice on Diagnosis of
COVID-19 Radiology Imaging Using EfficientNet
Zümrüt Müftüoğlu
Department of Big Data and Artificial
Intelligence Applications
The Presidency of the Republic of
Turkey,
The Digital Transformation Office
Ankara, Turkey
zumrut.muftuoglu@cbddo.gov.tr
https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3754-7491
M. Ayyüce Kızrak
Department of Big Data and Artificial
Intelligence Applications
The Presidency of the Republic of
Turkey,
The Digital Transformation Office
Ankara, Turkey
ayyuce.kizrak@cbddo.gov.tr
https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8545-4586
Tülay Yıldırım
Department of Electronics and
Communication Engineering
Yıldız Technical University
Istanbul, Turkey
tulay@yildiz.edu.tr
https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9993-5583
Abstract— Medical sciences are an important application
area of artificial intelligence. Healthcare requires
meticulousness in the whole process from collecting data to
processing. It should also be handled in terms of data quality,
data size, and data privacy. Various data are used within the
scope of the COVID-19 outbreak struggle. Medical and location
data collected from mobile phones and wearable devices are
used to prevent the spread of the epidemic. In addition to this,
artificial intelligence approaches are presented by using medical
images in order to identify COVID-19 infected people. However,
studies should be carried out by taking care not to endanger the
security of the data, people, and countries needed for these
useful applications. Therefore, differential privacy (DP)
application, which was an interesting research subject, has been
included in this study. CXR images have been collected from
COVID-19 infected 139 and a total of 373 public data sources
were used for a diagnostic concept. It has been trained with
EfficientNet-B0, a recent and robust deep learning model, and
proposal the possibility of infected with an accuracy of 94.7%.
Other evaluation parameters were also discussed in detail.
Despite the data constraint, this performance showed that it can
be improved by augmenting the dataset. The most important
aspect of the study was the proposal of differential privacy
practice for such applications to be reliable in real-life use cases.
With this view, experiments were repeated with DP applied
images and the results obtained were presented. Here, Private
Aggregation of Teacher Ensembles (PATE) approach was used
to ensure privacy assurance.
Keywords—: COVID-19, deep learning, EfficientNet, X-Ray,
radiology imaging, PATE, differential privacy.
I. INTRODUCTION
Coronavirus, which was uncovered for the first time in
Wuhan, China in December 2019, was proclaimed as a new
coronavirus by the World Health Organization (WHO-WHO)
on 11 February 2020 and named as COVID-19 (2019-nCov)
[1]. Governments take various prevention to reduce the extent
of the epidemic. Some of them are to close the borders and to
recommend social distance limits. However, the number of
individuals affected by coronavirus continues to increase in
most countries. Clinical trials, medicines, and vaccines need
to be developed and implemented to ensure that the
importance and challenges are also medically functional.
Based on the data published in the process, while waiting for
the Polymerase Chain Reaction (PCR) test time required
for
© IEEE 2020. This article is free to access and download, along with rights
for full text and data mining, re-use and analysis
diagnosis, pioneering estimates help healthcare professionals,
accelerate diagnosis by data science and artificial intelligence
studies.
New studies are added to the literature for the diagnosis of
COVID-19 using medical images. A study examines the
clinical features of pneumonia patients infected with
coronavirus and influenza virus and emphasizes that it is
possible to record the stage of the disease based on chest CT
and CXR images and other test results. CT and CXR shots are
used as an auxiliary diagnostic parameter recommended by
radiologists and other experts [2], [3]. Wang et al. Deep
learning model uses 1119 CT images in their studies.
However, these images also contain images of patients
diagnosed with viral pneumonia. The total accuracy rate is
calculated as 79.3%, specificity for test dataset 83%,
sensitivity 67%. In this research where modified-Inception
was used as the deep learning model, the accuracy of giving
correct diagnosis to COVID-19 positive patients was 85.2%
[4]. Zhao et al. in their study, use a convolutional neural
network-based model by making use of 275 CT images. In this
binary classification study, the general accuracy rate is 84.7%,
while it reaches 85.3% in F1-score [5].
This study uses artificial intelligence for a successful and
rapid diagnostic recommendation using CXR prior to the
waiting time for tests due to the density in hospitals.
Nevertheless, the focus of the study is on the privacy
approaches that should be taken into consideration while
producing artificial intelligence solutions by making use of
medical data. This paper covers an application to draw
attention to data privacy while reaching fast solutions.
Differential privacy ensures that data-driven work develops in
a reliable environment. It allows governments or technology
companies to collect and share information about individuals
while protecting the privacy of individual users.
The organization of the paper is as follows. In the second
section, details about the relevant COVID-19 medical imaging
and dataset used are inscribed. Besides, details about the
implemented deep learning and explainability model and
experimental results are presented in common with the
evaluation metrics. The proposed differential privacy
application was introduced in section 3. In section 4, the
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