Accurate and intelligent diagnosis of pediatric pneumonia using X-ray images and blood testing data

Abstract

Computer-aided diagnosis (CAD) methods such as the X-rays-based method is one of the cheapest and safe alternative options to diagnose the disease compared to other alternatives such as Computed Tomography (CT) scan, and so on. However, according to our experiments on X-ray public datasets and real clinical datasets, we found that there are two challenges in the current classification of pneumonia: existing public datasets have been preprocessed too well, making the accuracy of the results relatively high; existing models have weak ability to extract features from the clinical pneumonia X-ray dataset. To solve the dataset problems, we collected a new dataset of pediatric pneumonia with labels obtained through a comprehensive pathogen-radiology-clinical diagnostic screening. Then, to accurately capture the important features in imbalanced data, based on the new dataset, we proposed for the first time a two-stage training multimodal pneumonia classification method combining X-ray images and blood testing data, which improves the image feature extraction ability through a global-local attention module and mitigate the influence of class imbalance data on the results through the two-stage training strategy. In experiments, the performance of our proposed model is the best on new clinical data and outperforms the diagnostic accuracy of four experienced radiologists. Through further research on the performance of various blood testing indicators in the model, we analyzed the conclusions that are helpful for radiologists to diagnose.