Deep Learning Methods for Screening Pulmonary Tuberculosis Using Chest X-rays

Tuberculosis (TB) is a contagious bacterial airborne disease, and is one of the top 10 causes of death worldwide. According to the World Health Organisation, around 1.8 billion people are infected with TB and 1.6 million deaths were reported in 2018. More importantly, 95% of cases and deaths were from developing countries. Yet, TB is a completely curable disease through early diagnosis. To achieve this goal one of the key requirements is efficient utilisation of existing diagnostic technologies, among which chest X-ray is the first line of diagnostic tool used for screening for active TB. The presented deep learning pipeline consists of three different modern deep learning architectures, to generate, segment, and classify lung X-rays. Apart from this, image preprocessing, image augmentation, genetic algorithm based hyper parameter tuning, and model ensembling were used to improve the diagnostic process. We were able to achieve classification accuracy of 97.1% (Youden’s index-0.941, sensitivity of 97.9%, specificity of 96.2%) which is a considerable improvement compared to the existing work in the literature. In our work, we present a highly accurate, automated TB screening system using chest X-rays, which would be helpful especially for low income countries with low access to qualified medical professionals.