Exploiting Cascaded Ensemble of Features for the Detection of Tuberculosis Using Chest Radiographs

Tuberculosis (TB) is a communicable disease that is one of the top 10 causes of death worldwide according to the World Health Organization. Hence, Early detection of Tuberculosis is an important task to save millions of lives from this life threatening disease. For diagnosing TB from chest X-Ray, different handcrafted features were utilized previously and they provided high accuracy even in a small dataset. However, at present, deep learning (DL) gains popularity in many computer vision tasks because of their better performance in comparison to the traditional manual feature extraction based machine learning approaches and Tuberculosis detection task is not an exception. Considering all these facts, a cascaded ensembling method is proposed that combines both the hand-engineered and the deep learning-based features for the Tuberculosis detection task. To make the proposed model more generalized, rotation-invariant augmentation techniques are introduced which is found very effective in this task. By using the proposed method, outstanding performance is achieved through extensive simulation on two benchmark datasets (99.7% and 98.4% accuracy on Shenzhen and Montgomery County datasets respectively) that verifies the effectiveness of the method.