Machine Learning in Recognition of Basic Pulmonary Pathologies

Abstract

Nowadays, during the diagnosis process, the doctor is able to obtain access to much information describing the patient’s condition using appropriate tools. However, there are always two sides to the coin. The doctor has certain limitations regarding the amount of data they can process at once. Information technology comes to the rescue, which with the help of computers is able to quickly and effectively separate important information from redundant information and support the doctor in making a diagnosis. In this work, a decision-making system was created to diagnose common lung pathologies in digital radiography images. Here, we consider four basic pulmonary diseases: pneumothorax, pneumonia, pulmonary consolidation, and lung lesions. Our objective is to develop a new automatic detection method of lung pathologies on chest X-ray radiographs using python programming language and its libraries. The approach uses solutions in the field of artificial intelligence, such as deep learning, convolutional neural network and segmentation to make a diagnosis that aims to help the radiologist at work. In the first sections, this work describes the fundamentals of the present form of diagnosis, a proposal to improve this process, the method of operation of the algorithms used, data acquisition, segmentation and processing methods. Then, the results of the operation of four different models and their implementation in a practical window program were presented. The best model, which detects pulmonary consolidation, achieves accuracy higher than 91%, which is a satisfactory result because they are not intended to replace radiologists but to improve their work. In the future, this type of program can be further developed by adding models that recognize other conditions.