Vulnerability analysis of chest x-ray image classification against adversarial attacks

Abstract

Recently, there have been several successful deep learning approaches for automatically classifying chest X-ray images into different disease categories. However, there is not yet a comprehensive vulnerability analysis of these models against the so-called adversarial perturbations/attacks, which makes deep models more trustful in clinical practices. In this paper, we extensively analyzed the performance of two state-of-the-art classification deep networks on chest X-ray images. These two networks were attacked by three different categories (ten methods in total) of adversarial methods (both white- and black-box), namely gradient-based, score-based, and decision-based attacks. Furthermore, we modified the pooling operations in the two classification networks to measure their sensitivities against different attacks, on the specific task of chest X-ray classification.