Skip to main content

Deep Learning at Chest Radiography: Automated Classification of Pulmonary Tuberculosis by Using Convolutional Neural Networks

In this paper, the authors explore the use of Deep Convolutional Neural Networls (DCNN) in classifying Tuberculosis (TB) in chest radiographs. One of the advantages of deep learning is its ability to excel with high dimensional datasets, such as images, which can be represented at multiple levels. 

Dataset

Four deidentified HIPAA-compliant datasets were used in this study that were exempted from review by the institutional review board, which consisted of 1007 posteroanterior chest radiographs.

DCNN Models and Training

AlexNet and GoogLeNet models, including pre-trained (on ImageNet from Caffe Model Zoo) and untrained models were used in the study. It was found that the AUCs of the pretrained networks were greater. The following solver parameters were used for training: 120 epochs; base learning rate for untrained models and for pretrained models, 0.01 and 0.001, respectively with stochastic gradient descent.  Both of the DCNNs in this studied used dropout or model regularization strategies to help overcome overfitting.

Data Augmentation

The following data augmentation techniques further increased the performance

  1. Random cropping of 227x227
  2. Mean subtraction and mirror images
  3. Rotation of 90, 180 and 270.
  4. Contrast Limited Adaptive Histogram Equalization processing

Ensembling


The ensembling technique was used to increase the AUC even further. Ensembles were performed by taking different weighted averages of the probability scores generated by the classifiers 
The best performing ensemble model had an AUC of 0.99. Refer below the table borrowed from the paper for complete results

The sensitivity of pre-trained AlexNet was 92.0% and the specificity was 94.7%. The sensitivity of pre-trained GoogLeNet was 92.0% and the specificity was 98.7%. The sensitivity of the ensemble was 97.3% and the specificity was 94.7%. 

Radiologist-augmented approach

This is were the paper takes turn to beyond the realms of deep learning, were they use a certain human to classify the images were the models fail.

For cases where the AlexNet and GoogLeNet classifiers had disagreement, an independent board-certified cardiothoracic radiologist (B.S., with 18 years of experience) blindly interpreted the images as either having manifestations of TB or as normal. This resulted in a sensitivity of 97.3% and a specificity of 100%.

Comments

Popular Posts

Ocean: Object-aware Anchor-free Tracking

The paper titled " Ocean: Object Aware Anchor Free Tracking " presents a novel approach to visual object tracking that is poised to outperform existing anchor-based approaches. The authors propose a unique anchor-free framework named Ocean, designed to address certain challenges in the current field of visual tracking. Introduction Visual object tracking is a crucial part of computer vision technology. The widely utilized anchor-based trackers have their limitations, which this paper attempts to address. The authors present the innovative Ocean framework, designed to transform the visual tracking field by improving adaptability and performance. The Problem with Anchor-Based Trackers Despite their wide usage, anchor-based trackers suffer from some notable drawbacks. They struggle with tracking objects experiencing drastic scale changes or those having high aspect ratios. The anchors, with their fixed scale and fixed ratios, can limit the flexibility of the trackers, making the...

BLIP: Bootstrapping Language-Image Pretraining for Unified Vision-Language Understanding

BLIP is a new vision-language model proposed by Microsoft Research Asia in 2022. It introduces a bootstrapping method to learn from noisy image-text pairs scraped from the web. The BLIP Framework BLIP consists of three key components: MED  - A multimodal encoder-decoder model that can encode images, text, and generate image-grounded text. Captioner  - Fine-tuned on COCO to generate captions for web images. Filter  - Fine-tuned on COCO to filter noisy image-text pairs. The pretraining process follows these steps: Collect noisy image-text pairs from the web. Pretrain MED on this data. Finetune captioner and filter on the COCO dataset. Use captioner to generate new captions for web images. Filter noisy pairs using the filter model. Repeat the process by pretraining on a cleaned dataset. This bootstrapping allows BLIP to learn from web-scale noisy data in a self-supervised manner. Innovations in BLIP Some interesting aspects of BLIP: Combines encoder-decoder capability in one...

ES3Net: Accurate and Efficient Edge-based Self-Supervised Stereo Matching Network

Efficient and accurate depth estimation plays an indispensable role in many real-world applications, such as autonomous vehicles, 3D reconstruction, and drone navigation. Despite the precision of stereo matching, its computational intensity can pose significant challenges for edge deployment. Moreover, the struggle of acquiring ground-truth depths for training stereo-matching networks further amplifies these challenges. Enter ES3Net, the Edge-based Self-Supervised Stereo matching Network, a solution designed to mitigate these obstacles. The Challenges of Depth Estimation When it comes to applications like autonomous driving or drone navigation, the importance of accurate depth estimation is hard to overstate. It provides a foundational understanding of the 3D world, allowing for intelligent decision-making and navigation. Traditionally, stereo matching has provided greater accuracy than monocular depth estimation due to the availability of a reference image. However, it also bri...