Deep-learning: A potential method for tuberculosis detection using chest radiography

Tuberculosis (TB) is a major health threat in the developing countries. Many patients die every year due to lack of treatment and error in diagnosis. Developing a computer-aided diagnosis (CAD) system for TB detection can help in early diagnosis and containing the disease. Most of the current CAD systems use handcrafted features, however, lately there is a shift towards deep-learning-based automatic feature extractors. In this paper, we present a potential method for tuberculosis detection using deep-learning which classifies CXR images into two categories, that is, normal and abnormal. We have used CNN architecture with 7 convolutional layers and 3 fully connected layers. The performance of three different optimizers has been compared. Out of these, Adam optimizer with an overall accuracy of 94.73% and validation accuracy of 82.09% performed best amongst them. All the results are obtained using Montgomery and Shenzhen datasets which are available in public domain.