  Coronavirus disease (Covid-19) has been the main agenda of the whole world
since it came in sight in December 2019. It has already caused thousands of
causalities and infected several millions worldwide. Any technological tool
that can be provided to healthcare practitioners to save time, effort, and
possibly lives has crucial importance. The main tools practitioners currently
use to diagnose Covid-19 are Reverse Transcription-Polymerase Chain reaction
(RT-PCR) and Computed Tomography (CT), which require significant time,
resources and acknowledged experts. X-ray imaging is a common and easily
accessible tool that has great potential for Covid-19 diagnosis. In this study,
we propose a novel approach for Covid-19 recognition from chest X-ray images.
Despite the importance of the problem, recent studies in this domain produced
not so satisfactory results due to the limited datasets available for training.
Recall that Deep Learning techniques can generally provide state-of-the-art
performance in many classification tasks when trained properly over large
datasets, such data scarcity can be a crucial obstacle when using them for
Covid-19 detection. Alternative approaches such as representation-based
classification (collaborative or sparse representation) might provide
satisfactory performance with limited size datasets, but they generally fall
short in performance or speed compared to Machine Learning methods. To address
this deficiency, Convolution Support Estimation Network (CSEN) has recently
been proposed as a bridge between model-based and Deep Learning approaches by
providing a non-iterative real-time mapping from query sample to ideally sparse
representation coefficient' support, which is critical information for class
decision in representation based techniques.
