From Pixels to Diagnosis: Convolutional Neural Networks in Tuberculosis Screening

Tuberculosis (TB) is a chronic lung disease that constitutes one of the top 10 global causes of death. Timely and precise identification of TB is critical, as untreated cases can pose life-threatening risks. Traditional radiographic interpretation by trained professionals is subjective, time-consuming, and prone to human error. This study proposes an automated deep learning-based approach for TB detection from chest X-ray images, based on EfficientNet-B0 architecture. The Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) extracts discriminative features, allowing it to differentiate between normal and abnormal lung patterns indicative of TB. Our choice of the EfficientNet-B0 architecture played a pivotal role in the success of our TB detection model. Training and evaluation were conducted on three distinct datasets: Tuberculosis (TB) Chest X-ray Database, Shenzhen Hospital CXR Set, and Montgomery County CXR Set. The key breakthrough is attaining an accuracy of 99.29% on the Tuberculosis (TB) Chest X-ray Database and 98.50% on the combined dataset. This study presents a promising approach for automated TB screening using readily available chest X-ray images, potentially improving diagnostic accuracy and efficiency, especially in resource-limited settings. We compared our scores with those of other works and found that ours significantly outperforms them.