Deep Convolutional Neural Networks with Augmentation for Chest X-Ray Classification

The recent release of large amounts of Chest radiographs (CXR) has prompted the research of automated analysis of Chest X-rays to improve health care services. DCNNs are well suited for image classification because they can learn to extract features from images that are relevant to the task at hand. However, class imbalance is a common problem in chest X-ray imaging, where the number of samples for some disease category is much lower than the number of samples in other categories. This can occur as a result of rarity of some diseases being studied or the fact that only a subset of patients with a particular disease may undergo imaging. Class imbalance can make it difficult for Deep Convolutional Neural networks (DCNNs) to learn and make accurate predictions on the minority classes. Obtaining more data for minority groups is not feasible in medical research. Therefore, there is a need for a suitable method that can address class imbalance. To address class imbalance in DCNNs, this study proposes, Deep Convolutional Neural Networks with Augmentation. The results show that data augmentation can be applied to imbalanced dataset to increase the representation of the minority class by generating new images that are a slight variation of the original CXR images. This study further evaluates identifiability and consistency of the proposed model.