Enhancing Clinical Diagnosis With Convolutional Neural Networks: Developing High-Accuracy Deep Learning Models for Differentiating Thoracic Pathologies

Abstract

Background The use of computational technology in medicine has allowed for an increase in the accuracy of clinical diagnosis, reducing errors through additional layers of oversight. Artificial intelligence technologies present the potential to further augment and expedite the accuracy, quality, and efficiency at which diagnosis can be made when used as an adjunctive tool. Such techniques, if found to be accurate and reliable in their diagnostic acuity, can be implemented to foster better clinical decision-making, improving patient quality of care while reducing healthcare costs. Methodology This study implemented convolution neural networks to develop a deep learning model capable of differentiating normal chest X-rays from those indicating pneumonia, tuberculosis, cardiomegaly, and COVID-19. There were 3,063 normal chest X-rays, 3,098 pneumonia chest X-rays, 2,920 COVID-19 chest X-rays, 2,214 chest X-rays, and 554 tuberculosis chest X-rays from Kaggle that were used for training and validation. The model was trained to recognize patterns within the chest X-rays to efficiently recognize these diseases within patients to be treated on time. Results The results indicated a success rate of 98.34% incorrect detections, exemplifying a high degree of accuracy. There are limitations to this study. Training models require hundreds to thousands of samples, and due to potential variability in image scanning equipment and techniques from which the images are sourced, the model could have learned to interpret external noise and unintended details which can adversely impact accuracy. Conclusions Further studies that implement more universal database-sourced images with similar image scanning techniques, assess diverse but related medical conditions, and the utilization of repeat trials can help assess the reliability of the model. These results highlight the potential of machine learning algorithms for disease detection with chest X-rays.

Keywords: chest x-ray; deep learning artificial intelligence; general internal medicine; general radiology; thoracic radiology; x-ray analysis.

Figure 1. Normal chest X-ray.

An example of the normal chest X-ray used to train our model. Chest X-ray images. Accessed on January 5, 2024, from https://www.kaggle.com/datasets/tolgadincer/labeled-chest-xray-images.

Figure 2. Confusion matrix.

The figure shows our true positive, true negative, false positive, and false negative ratios calculated by our confusion matrix.

Figure 3. Run 1 predictive ability of the model.

This graph shows our model’s accuracy and functionality during our first run.

Figure 4. Run 2 predictive ability of the model.

This graph shows the accuracy of our model improving on run 2 as the model learns from its previous run.