Focal Modulation Based End-to-End Multi-Label Classification for Chest X-ray Image Classification

Chest X-ray imaging is of critical importance in order to effectively diagnose chest diseases, which are increasing today due to various environmental and hereditary factors. Although chest X-ray is the most commonly used device for detecting pathological abnormalities, it can be quite challenging for specialists due to misleading locations and sizes of pathological abnormalities, visual similarities, and complex backgrounds. Traditional deep learning (DL) architectures fall short due to relatively small areas of pathological abnormalities and similarities between diseased and healthy areas. In addition, DL structures with standard classification approaches are not ideal for dealing with problems involving multiple diseases. In order to overcome the aforementioned problems, firstly, background-independent feature maps were created using a conventional convolutional neural network (CNN). Then, the relationships between objects in the feature maps are made suitable for multi-label classification tasks using the focal modulation network (FMA), an innovative attention module that is more effective than the self-attention approach. Experiments using a Chest x-ray dataset containing both single and multiple labels for a total of 14 different diseases show that the proposed approach can provide superior performance for multi-label datasets.