Deep learning-based automatic detection of tuberculosis disease in chest X-ray images

Purpose
To train a convolutional neural network (CNN) model from scratch to automatically detect tuberculosis (TB) from chest X-ray (CXR) images and compare its performance with transfer learning based technique of different pre-trained CNNs.

Material and methods
We used two publicly available datasets of postero-anterior chest radiographs, which are from Montgomery County, Maryland, and Shenzhen, China. A CNN (ConvNet) from scratch was trained to automatically detect TB on chest radiographs. Also, a CNN-based transfer learning approach using five different pre-trained models, including Inception_v3, Xception, ResNet50, VGG19, and VGG16 was utilized for classifying TB and normal cases from CXR images. The performance of models for testing datasets was evaluated using five performances metrics, including accuracy, sensitivity/recall, precision, area under curve (AUC), and F1-score.

Results
All proposed models provided an acceptable accuracy for two-class classification. Our proposed CNN architecture (i.e., ConvNet) achieved 88.0% precision, 87.0% sensitivity, 87.0% F1-score, 87.0% accuracy, and AUC of 87.0%, which was slightly less than the pre-trained models. Among all models, Exception, ResNet50, and VGG16 provided the highest classification performance of automated TB classification with precision, sensitivity, F1-score, and AUC of 91.0%, and 90.0% accuracy.

Conclusions
Our study presents a transfer learning approach with deep CNNs to automatically classify TB and normal cases from the chest radiographs. The classification accuracy, precision, sensitivity, and F1-score for the detection of TB were found to be more than 87.0% for all models used in the study. Exception, ResNet50, and VGG16 models outperformed other deep CNN models for the datasets with image augmentation methods.