Application of Deep Learning Techniques for Detection of Pneumothorax in Chest Radiographs.

Journal: Sensors (Basel, Switzerland)
Published Date:

Abstract

With the advent of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and even more so recently in the field of Machine Learning (ML), there has been rapid progress across the field. One of the prominent examples is image recognition in the medical category, such as X-ray imaging, Computed Tomography (CT), and Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI). It has the potential to alleviate a doctor's heavy workload of sifting through large quantities of images. Due to the rising attention to lung-related diseases, such as pneumothorax and nodules, ML is being incorporated into the field in the hope of alleviating the already strained medical resources. In this study, we proposed a system that can detect pneumothorax diseases reliably. By comparing multiple models and hyperparameter configurations, we recommend a model for hospitals, as its focus on minimizing false positives aligns with the precision required by medical professionals. Through our cooperation with Poh-Ai Hospital, we acquired a total of over 8000 X-ray images, with more than 1000 of them from pneumothorax patients. We hope that by integrating AI systems into the automated process of scanning chest X-ray images with various diseases, more resources will be available in the already strained medical systems. Our proposed system showed that the best model that is used for transfer learning from our dataset performed with an AP of 51.57 and an AP75 of 61.40, with accuracy at 93.89%, a false positive of 1.12%, and a false negative of 4.99%. Based on the feedback from practicing doctors, they are more wary of false positives. For their use case, we recommend another model due to the lower false positive rate and higher accuracy compared with other models, which in our test shows a rate of only 0.88% and 95.68%, demonstrating the feasibility of the research. This promising result showed that it could be utilized in other types of diseases and expand to more hospitals and medical organizations, potentially benefitting more people.

Authors

  • Lawrence Y Deng
    Department of Artificial Intelligence, Tamkang University, Tamsui, New Taipei City 251301, Taiwan.
  • Xiang-Yann Lim
    Department of Computer Science and Information Engineering, Tamkang University, Tamsui, New Taipei City 251301, Taiwan.
  • Tang-Yun Luo
    Office of Physical Education, Tamkang University, Tamsui, New Taipei City 251301, Taiwan.
  • Ming-Hsun Lee
    Department of Radiology, Lotung Poh-Ai Hospital, Yilan 265501, Taiwan.
  • Tzu-Ching Lin
    Department of Computer Science and Information Engineering, Tamkang University, Tamsui, New Taipei City 251301, Taiwan.