An Efficient Deep Learning Approach to Pneumonia Classification in Healthcare

Abstract

This study proposes a convolutional neural network model trained from scratch to classify and detect the presence of pneumonia from a collection of chest X-ray image samples. Unlike other methods that rely solely on transfer learning approaches or traditional handcrafted techniques to achieve a remarkable classification performance, we constructed a convolutional neural network model from scratch to extract features from a given chest X-ray image and classify it to determine if a person is infected with pneumonia. This model could help mitigate the reliability and interpretability challenges often faced when dealing with medical imagery. Unlike other deep learning classification tasks with sufficient image repository, it is difficult to obtain a large amount of pneumonia dataset for this classification task; therefore, we deployed several data augmentation algorithms to improve the validation and classification accuracy of the CNN model and achieved remarkable validation accuracy.