The competence of machine learning approaches to carry out clinical expertise tasks has recently gained a lot of attention, particularly in the field of medical-imaging examination. Among the most frequently used clinical-imaging modalities in the healthcare profession is chest radiography, which calls for prompt reporting of the existence of potential anomalies and illness diagnostics in images. Automated frameworks for the recognition of chest abnormalities employing X-rays are being introduced in health departments. However, the reliable detection and classification of particular illnesses in chest X-ray samples is still a complicated issue because of the complex structure of radiographs, e.g., the large exposure dynamic range. Moreover, the incidence of various image artifacts and extensive inter- and intra-category resemblances further increases the difficulty of chest disease recognition procedures. The aim of this study was to resolve these existing problems. We propose a deep learning (DL) approach to the detection of chest abnormalities with the X-ray modality using the EfficientDet (CXray-EffDet) model. More clearly, we employed the EfficientNet-B0-based EfficientDet-D0 model to compute a reliable set of sample features and accomplish the detection and classification task by categorizing eight categories of chest abnormalities using X-ray images. The effective feature computation power of the CXray-EffDet model enhances the power of chest abnormality recognition due to its high recall rate, and it presents a lightweight and computationally robust approach. A large test of the model employing a standard database from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) was conducted to demonstrate the chest disease localization and categorization performance of the CXray-EffDet model. We attained an AUC score of 0.9080, along with an IOU of 0.834, which clearly determines the competency of the introduced model.
Keywords: EfficientDet; X-ray; chest diseases; classification; deep learning; localization.