A novel approach for tuberculosis screening based on deep convolutional neural networks

Tuberculosis (TB) is one of the major global health threats especially in developing countries. Although newly diagnosed TB patients can be recovered with high cure rate, many curable TB patients in the developing countries are obliged to die because of delayed diagnosis, partly by the lack of radiography and radiologists. Therefore, developing a computer-aided diagnosis (CAD) system for TB screening can contribute to early diagnosis of TB, which results in prevention of deaths from TB. Currently, most CAD algorithms adopt carefully designed morphological features distinguishing different lesion types to improve screening performances. However, such engineered features cannot be guaranteed to be the best descriptors for TB screening. Deep learning has become a majority in machine learning society. Especially in computer vision fields, it has been verified that deep convolutional neural networks (CNN) is a very promising algorithm for various visual tasks. Since deep CNN enables end-to-end training from feature extraction to classification, it does not require objective-specific manual feature engineering. In this work, we designed CAD system based on deep CNN for automatic TB screening. Based on large-scale chest X-rays (CXRs), we achieved viable TB screening performance of 0.96, 0.93 and 0.88 in terms of AUC for three real field datasets, respectively, by exploiting the effect of transfer learning.