PneumoniaNet: Automated Detection and Classification of Pediatric Pneumonia Using Chest X-ray Images and CNN Approach

Pneumonia is an inflammation of the lung parenchyma that is caused by a variety of infectious microorganisms and non-infective agents. All age groups can be affected; however, in most cases, fragile groups are more susceptible than others. Radiological images such as Chest X-ray (CXR) images provide early detection and prompt action, where typical CXR for such a disease is characterized by radiopaque appearance or seemingly solid segment at the affected parts of the lung due to inflammatory exudate formation replacing the air in the alveoli. The early and accurate detection of pneumonia is crucial to avoid fatal ramifications, particularly in children and seniors. In this paper, we propose a novel 50 layers Convolutional Neural Network (CNN)-based architecture that outperforms the state-of-the-art models. The suggested framework is trained using 5852 CXR images and statistically tested using five-fold cross-validation. The model can distinguish between three classes: viz viral, bacterial, and normal; with 99.7% +/- 0.2 accuracy, 99.74% +/- 0.1 sensitivity, and 0.9812 Area Under the Curve (AUC). The results are promising, and the new architecture can be used to recognize pneumonia early with cost-effectiveness and high accuracy, especially in remote areas that lack proper access to expert radiologists, and therefore, reduces pneumonia-caused mortality rates.