Deep Learning–based Diagnosis of Pulmonary Tuberculosis on Chest X-ray in the Emergency Department: A Retrospective Study

Prompt and correct detection of pulmonary tuberculosis (PTB) is critical in preventing its spread. We aimed to develop a deep learning–based algorithm for detecting PTB on chest X-ray (CXRs) in the emergency department. This retrospective study included 3498 CXRs acquired from the National Taiwan University Hospital (NTUH). The images were chronologically split into a training dataset, NTUH-1519 (images acquired during the years 2015 to 2019; n = 2144), and a testing dataset, NTUH-20 (images acquired during the year 2020; n = 1354). Public databases, including the NIH ChestX-ray14 dataset (model training; 112,120 images), Montgomery County (model testing; 138 images), and Shenzhen (model testing; 662 images), were also used in model development. EfficientNetV2 was the basic architecture of the algorithm. Images from ChestX-ray14 were employed for pseudo-labelling to perform semi-supervised learning. The algorithm demonstrated excellent performance in detecting PTB (area under the receiver operating characteristic curve [AUC] 0.878, 95% confidence interval [CI] 0.854–0.900) in NTUH-20. The algorithm showed significantly better performance in posterior-anterior (PA) CXR (AUC 0.940, 95% CI 0.912–0.965, p-value < 0.001) compared with anterior–posterior (AUC 0.782, 95% CI 0.644–0.897) or portable anterior–posterior (AUC 0.869, 95% CI 0.814–0.918) CXR. The algorithm accurately detected cases of bacteriologically confirmed PTB (AUC 0.854, 95% CI 0.823–0.883). Finally, the algorithm tested favourably in Montgomery County (AUC 0.838, 95% CI 0.765–0.904) and Shenzhen (AUC 0.806, 95% CI 0.771–0.839). A deep learning–based algorithm could detect PTB on CXR with excellent performance, which may help shorten the interval between detection and airborne isolation for patients with PTB.