Classification and Predictions of Lung Diseases from Chest X-rays Using MobileNet V2

Featured Application: The method presented in this paper can be applied in medical computer systems for supporting medical diagnosis.Abstract: Thoracic radiography (chest X-ray) is an inexpensive but effective and widely used medical imaging procedure. However, a lack of qualified radiologists severely limits the applicability of the technique. Even current Deep Learning-based approaches often require strong supervision, e.g., annotated bounding boxes, to train such systems, which is impossible to harvest on a large scale. In this work, we proposed the classification and prediction of lung pathologies of frontal thoracic X-rays using a modified model MobileNet V2. We considered using transfer learning with metadata leverage. We used the NIH Chest-Xray-14 database, and we did a comparison of performance of our approach to other state-of-the-art methods for pathology classification. The main comparison was by Area under the Receiver Operating Characteristic Curve (AUC) statistics and analyzed the differences between classifiers. Overall, we notice a considerable spread in the achieved result with an average AUC of 0.811 and an accuracy above 90%. We conclude that resampling the dataset gives a huge improvement to the model performance. In this work, we intended to create a model that is capable of being trained, and modified devices with low computing power because they can be implemented into smaller IoT devices.