Multiple Feature Integration for Classification of Thoracic Disease in Chest Radiography

The accurate localization and classification of lung abnormalities from radiological images are important for clinical diagnosis and treatment strategies. However, multilabel classification, wherein medical images are interpreted to point out multiple existing or suspected pathologies, presents practical constraints. Building a highly precise classification model typically requires a huge number of images manually annotated with labels and finding masks that are expensive to acquire in practice. To address this intrinsically weakly supervised learning problem, we present the integration of different features extracted from shallow handcrafted techniques and a pretrained deep CNN model. The model consists of two main approaches: a localization approach that concentrates adaptively on the pathologically abnormal regions utilizing pretrained DenseNet-121 and a classification approach that integrates four types of local and deep features extracted respectively from SIFT, GIST, LBP, and HOG, and convolutional CNN features. We demonstrate that our approaches efficiently leverage interdependencies among target annotations and establish the state of the art classification results of 14 thoracic diseases in comparison with current reference baselines on the publicly available ChestX-ray14 dataset.