Automatic Detection of Tuberculosis Using Deep Learning Methods

In this paper, we present a deep learning based approach for automatically detecting tuberculosis manifestation from chest X-ray images. India is the country with the highest burden of tuberculosis. A chest radiograph in symptomatic patients is used to diagnose active tuberculosis. This screening method is ideally done at the primary health care centres where a clinician is available and sometimes through mobile X-ray unit. The major challenge for this method of screening is timely reporting and further follow-up of patient for initiation of treatment. We built multiple convolutional neural networks, the state-of-the-art deep learning algorithm, to build the model for automatic tuberculosis diagnosis. We classified the chest X-rays into two categories, namely, tuberculosis presence and tuberculosis absence. The dataset used to train the model contained 678 images, having 340 normal chest X-rays and 338 chest X-rays with tuberculosis manifestation. The validation dataset contained 235 images, which observed a sensitivity of 84.91% and a specificity of 93.02%. This demonstrates the potential of convolutional neural networks to automatically classify chest X-rays in real time.