Comparative Analysis of Convolutional Neural Networks Applied in the Detection of Pneumonia Through X-Ray Images of Children

Pneumonia is one of the most common medical problems in clinical practice and is the leading fatal infectious disease worldwide. According to the World Health Organization, pneumonia kills about 2 million children under the age of 5 and is constantly estimated to be the leading cause of infant mortality, killing more children than AIDS, malaria, and measles combined. A key element in the diagnosis is radiographic data, as chest x-rays are routinely obtained as a standard of care and can aid to differentiate the types of pneumonia. However, a rapid radiological interpretation of images is not always available, particularly in places with few resources, where childhood pneumonia has the highest incidence and mortality rates. As an alternative, the application of deep learning techniques for the classification of medical images has grown considerably in recent years. This study presents five implementations of convolutional neural networks (CNNs): ResNet50, VGG-16, InceptionV3, InceptionResNetV2, and ResNeXt50. To support the diagnosis of the disease, these CNNs were applied to solve the classification problem of medical radiographs from people with pneumonia. InceptionResNetV2 obtained the best recall and precision results for the Normal and Pneumonia classes, 93.95% and 97.52% respectively. ResNeXt50 achieved the best precision and f1-score results for the Normal class (94.62% and 94.25% respectively) and the recall and f1-score results for the Pneumonia class (97.80% and 97.65%, respectively).