Comparative Study for Tuberculosis Detection by Using Deep Learning

Tuberculosis (TB) is an infectious disease which becomes a significant health problem worldwide. Many people have been affected by this disease owing to deficiency of treatment and late or inaccuracy of diagnosis. Therefore, accurate and early diagnosis is the very major solution to checking and preventing the disease. A chest x-ray is a main diagnostic tool used to diagnose tuberculosis. This diagnostic method is limited by the availability of radiologists and the experience and skills of radiologists in reading x-rays. To overcome such a challenge, a computer-aided diagnosis (CAD) system is supposed for the radiologist to interpret chest x-ray images easily. In this study, a CAD system based upon transfer learning is developed for TB detection using Montgomery Country chest x-ray images. We used the VGG16, VGG19, DenseNet121, MobileNet, and InceptionV3 pre-trained CNN models to extract features automatically and used the Support Vector Machine (SVM) classifier to the detection of tuberculosis. Furthermore, data augmentation techniques were applied to boost the performance results. The proposed method performed the highest accuracy of 98.9% and area under the curve (AUC) of 1.00, respectively, with the DenseNet121 on augmented images.