An infectious disease called tuberculosis (TB) exhibits pneumonia-like symptoms and traits. One of the most important methods for identifying and diagnosing pneumonia and tuberculosis is X-ray imaging. However, early discrimination is difficult for radiologists and doctors because of the similarities between pneumonia and tuberculosis. As a result, patients do not receive the proper care, which in turn does not prevent the disease from spreading. The goal of this study is to extract hybrid features using a variety of techniques in order to achieve promising results in differentiating between pneumonia and tuberculosis. In this study, several approaches for early identification and distinguishing tuberculosis from pneumonia were suggested. The first proposed system for differentiating between pneumonia and tuberculosis uses hybrid techniques, VGG16 + support vector machine (SVM) and ResNet18 + SVM. The second proposed system for distinguishing between pneumonia and tuberculosis uses an artificial neural network (ANN) based on integrating features of VGG16 and ResNet18, before and after reducing the high dimensions using the principal component analysis (PCA) method. The third proposed system for distinguishing between pneumonia and tuberculosis uses ANN based on integrating features of VGG16 and ResNet18 separately with handcrafted features extracted by local binary pattern (LBP), discrete wavelet transform (DWT) and gray level co-occurrence matrix (GLCM) algorithms. All the proposed systems have achieved superior results in the early differentiation between pneumonia and tuberculosis. An ANN based on the features of VGG16 with LBP, DWT and GLCM (LDG) reached an accuracy of 99.6%, sensitivity of 99.17%, specificity of 99.42%, precision of 99.63%, and an AUC of 99.58%.
Keywords: ANN; DWT; GLCM; LBP; PCA; ResNet18; VGG16; tuberculosis.