Automated Pneumonia Diagnosis using a 2D Deep Convolutional Neural Network with Chest X-Ray Images

Tiny air sacs in one or both lungs become inflamed as a result of the lung infection known as pneumonia. In order to provide the best possible treatment plan, pneumonia must be accurately and quickly diagnosed at initial stages. Nowadays, a chest X-ray is regarded as the most effective imaging technique for detecting pneumonia. However, performing chest X-ray analysis may be quite difficult and laborious. For this purpose, in this study we propose deep convolutional neural network (CNN) with 24 hidden layers to identify pneumonia using chest X-ray images. In order to get high accuracy of the proposed deep CNN we applied an image processing method as well as rescaling and data augmentation methods as shear_range, rotation, zooming, CLAHE, and vertical_flip. The proposed approach has been evaluated using different evaluation criteria and has demonstrat-ed 97.2%, 97.1%, 97.43%, 96%, 98.8% performance in terms of accuracy, precision, recall, F-score, and AUC-ROC curve. Thus, the applied deep CNN obtain a high level of performance in pneumonia detection. In general, the provided approach is intended to aid radiologists in making an accurate pneumonia diagnosis. Additionally, our suggested models could be helpful in the early detection of other chest-related illnesses such as COVID-19.