A Novel Approach for Multi-Label Chest X-Ray Classification of Common Thorax Diseases

Abstract

Chest X-ray (CXR) is one of the most common types of radiology examination for the diagnosis of thorax diseases. Computer-aided diagnosis (CAD) was developed to help radiologists to achieve diagnostic excellence in a short period of time and to enhance patient healthcare. In this paper, we seek to improve the performance of the CAD system in the task of thorax diseases diagnosis by providing a new method that combines the advantages of CNN models in image feature extraction with those of the problem transformation methods in the multi-label classification task. The experimental study is tested on two publicly available CXR datasets ChestX-ray14 (frontal view) and CheXpert (frontal and lateral views). The results show that our proposed method outperformed the current state of the art.

Keywords

• CAD
• CXR
• transfer learning
• CNN
• computer vision
• multi-label classification