Early detection of tuberculosis using hybrid feature descriptors and deep learning network

Purpose
To detect tuberculosis (TB) at an early stage by analyzing chest X-ray images using a deep neural network, and to evaluate the efficacy of proposed model by comparing it with existing studies.

Material and methods
For the study, an open-source X-ray images were used. Dataset consisted of two types of images, i.e., standard and tuberculosis. Total number of images in the dataset was 4,200, among which, 3,500 were normal chest X-rays, and the remaining 700 X-ray images were of tuberculosis patients. The study proposed and simulated a deep learning prediction model for early TB diagnosis by combining deep features with hand-engineered features. Gabor filter and Canny edge detection method were applied to enhance the performance and reduce computation cost.

Results
The proposed model simulated two scenarios: without filter and edge detection techniques and only a pre-trained model with automatic feature extraction, and filter and edge detection techniques. The results achieved from both the models were 95.7% and 97.9%, respectively.

Conclusions
The proposed study can assist in the detection if a radiologist is not available. Also, the model was tested with real-time images to examine the efficacy, and was better than other available models.