Identifying drug-resistant tuberculosis from chest X-ray images using a simple convolutional neural network

Abstract Tuberculosis(TB) is one of the top 10 causes of death worldwide, and drug-resistant TB is a major public health concern especially in resource-constrained countries. In such countries, molecular diagnosis of drug-resistant TB remains a challenge; and imaging tools such as X-rays, which are cheaply and widely available, can be a valuable supplemental resource for early detection and screening. This study uses a specialized convolutional neural network to perform binary classification of chest X-ray images to classify drug-resistant and drug-sensitive TB. The models were trained and validated using the TBPortals dataset which contains 2,973 labeled X-ray images from TB patients. The classifiers were able to identify the presence or absence of drug-resistant Tuberculosis with an AUROC between 0.66–0.67, which is an improvement over previous attempts using deep learning networks.